JOSEF'S FORGE - 7
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 7
(Revisiting Chapter 6)
Comrade Stalin ordered that the railroad project be put into high gear as soon as possible. He again promised the German railroad, first labor call on the 900,000 ethnic Germans (Saxons and Swabians) whom the Red Army was moving out of the Balkans, any NKVD supervisory personnel needed, necessary funds, and support for other needs as they developed. "I think we have diverted Moscow's attention from our recent troubles," the Commandant chortled quietly and with a wink.
(Continuing Our Story - The Great German Railroad)
Colonel von Escher's prescription was not exactly unique, but it did capture everyone's imagination! Actually, it had been used by the English when rails had to be laid through the Bombay swamps in India. In brief, "mattresses" were made from mangrove trees and spread upon the mud; then soil was placed on top to press the mattresses a certain depth; another mattress was superimposed and more soil placed, until a structure was obtained sufficient for a solid roadbed. Additionally, the Colonel located several points on the route where suspension bridges could be built. The depth of Stalin's commitment was indicated when the plan was approved within a week, when near inexhaustible sources of mangrove and cypress trees were located, and a large number were transported to Vladivostok, loaded on Trans Siberian flatcars, and given priority for shipment west to Tyumen!
Josef was not always to be found at the siding area, for the Commandant arranged for different groups of Camp prisoners to be involved in the project on a scheduled basis. He was there often, however, for the Major seemed to regard him as something of a good luck talisman. In truth, he was absolutely amazed when he saw the area on his next trip. The siding area had been transformed into a multi-acre supply base for the new railroad spur. Equipment, including the entire railroad "lifted" from eastern Germany, was stacked neatly throughout the site. Thousands of Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans who had been living in eastern Europe, often for centuries] from Transylvania and the Danube Basin were working under the supervision of a small army of NKVD guards. Supplies and people seemed to be literally pouring into the area from trains constantly arriving from the west and shunted onto new tracks in the siding. The area, constantly patrolled by guards carrying AK-47s and leading snarling dogs, was illuminated by great lights and seemed to be operating around the clock.
The Major's greatest problem seemed similar to that of the earlier Commandant of the Camp, the one who had been in charge when the Squad arrived. Namely, the NKVD guards were, to put the matter bluntly, sadists. Everyone lived out in the open; the weather was terrible; the Germans had been treated poorly in the Balkans prior to their departure and had suffered grievously in transit. They were dying like flies - or, perhaps more accurately, Siberian mosquitos. The Major's first job was to fray out the hill. In addition to ordering a full medical field hospital directly from Moscow, he ordered that guards who stole food or supplies were to be shot on the spot. Guards who abused prisoners were taken before inquiry boards that could punish as severely as ordering them to work alongside the prisoners. Prisoner morale improved...somewhat. Theft nearly stopped - although it was noticed that diets in the Major's three camps improved slightly. A few of the long-time prisoners in his camps also saw the first medical doctors since serving with the Sixth Army! Such is life in Russia!
As soon as the stage was set, the railroad started inching its way north. First, Red Army helicopters with specialist crews checked out the Colonel's suggested route. (Almost no changes were ordered - and those that were ordered were minor.) Secondly, working parties made their way into the area, setting markers. Work groups responsible for the three suspension bridges left the area at that time to be ferried by helicopter to their sites together with materials needed initially. Other work groups cut down trees as necessary and began the job of assembling their "mattresses." Working in cold water, mud, and other debris for hours at a time, they did not have an enviable assignment. Before the project was completed, thousands became sick, and thousands died. The long train loads of Danubian German laborers promised by Stalin simply kept coming.
Josef, as well as other members of the Squad, got to know many of the German laborers as they worked beside them. Josef, in particular, could have opted out of this duty, but he chose not to. One result was that the worst treatment of the Balkan Germans was at least kept in check. Too many of the NKVD guards had noticed the closeness between the Commandant and the young German soldier for them to take their contempt and hatred as far as they might have liked. There were some good moments during this period, for example, the meeting between Josef and Bernhard. Bernhard was a simple peasant boy of 16 from a village on the Hungarian plain. Everybody told them, he admitted, that they should leave with the German and other Axis troops retreating before the Red Army. Saying that the village had been their home all their lives, they refused. The Russian horde extracted a high price for the atrocities that had been committed by German troops in their triumphal march across much of European Russia. The older members of his family together with the young children were simply shot, the older women - and some of the little girls - after being raped. Younger women in condition to work and the handful of males left in the village were gathered up with other Volksdeutsche and shipped east as slave labor. Few would see their homes again. In the holding camp, Bernhard sobbed, he had been repeatedly raped by a group of Romanian guards.
"So...you're no longer a man, and you are going to lie down and die?" asked Josef...and not all that gently. "What's to live for?" Bernhard sniveled. "Look about you," Josef panted as he helped lift a new mattress onto the foundation and began to pack mud onto it. "You're alive. God knows you want something better than this! You're young so you've got a chance of outliving this madness. There are others in far worse shape than you who need a kind word, if nothing more. Your body yearns for life, not death!" With that, Josef slowly drew his hand down Bernhard's pale back and, under the muddy water, squeezed his naked buttocks. The boy looked at him, grinned wryly, shook his head, and mumbled, "Thanks, Josef. I'll make it...at least today." For another fifteen minutes or so, Josef shared hints on staying alive in this hellhole, e.g., learn Russian... fast, make sure that you eat every bit of food available even if you're tired or sick. That night, back on more solid ground, the billowing smoke of large fires keeping the mosquitos at bay, Bernhard crept into Josef's arms. The young sergeant gave the still bashful boy additional reasons to live. Before they turned over to sleep, Josef withdrew his lips from Bernhard's and whispered in a joking tone, "No longer a man, huh?"
Yes, the going was slow. Yes, they were delays and setbacks. Nevertheless, the roadbed was being built and three small but spectacular suspension bridges carried the railroad even further north. In the fulness of time, the track was laid and ballasted. Before Josef and the rest of the Squad returned to the camp, they heard the whistle of the steam locomotive, a sound that immediately returned them to their homes in Germany, if only in memory and for a few minutes.
(The Boys from Moscow)
As noted earlier, the camp had gradually been transformed from a Stalingrad POW camp to something more like a typical Soviet gulag as prisoners arrived from all over eastern Europe. Many were ethnic Germans, but many more represented the native intelligentsia and other potentially resistant elements of the countries "liberated" by the Red Army. Further, as the Red Army advanced into the eastern German lands, the camps began to see large numbers of Germans from East Prussia and Silesia. A growing mass of humanity was simply swept up into the vortex that was Uncle Josef's Forge and devoted to providing labor and materials for the Soviet recovery. The fact that they existed under highly inhumane conditions in which far more died than survived was missed by most observers at the time. Western eyes were focused on the discovery of the death camps and the end of the war. For Russians, the gulags were simply a fact of life that one did not think about, let alone question.
When they had completed their last stint on the railroad, Josef, Thomas, Gerd, Wolf, Heinz, and Erich returned to a camp that was nearly three times as large as the camp that the Stalingrad prisoners had hacked out of the wilderness. It, and its two sister camps, produced a constant stream of lumber and forest products that made their way to the Trans Siberian railway and thence west. The Commandant of the camp, now a Colonel, respected throughout the organization and consulted for his opinion in many situations, welcomed their return. They were immediately switched from the Records Office to a new office that oversaw quotas and the smooth provision of products to the outside world. In this office they were able to support the Commandant's desire that the repressive camp should become, insofar as possible, a smooth running business. In truth, in the three camps under his supervision, medical care and food for the prisoners had never been better - and productivity soared. The fact that this model wasn't adopted by the entire gulag system was essentially due to personal wishes of those at the highest levels of Soviet government. In all fairness, it should be noted that the objectors may well have remembered the unbelievably barbaric treatment of Soviet POWs by the Germans. (The Germans took approximately 5.5 million Soviets prisoners.
In a studied program of genocide, nearly 3.5 million died while in captivity. Next only to the Holocaust that saw the death of six million Jews, it was one of the sorriest pages in the annals of World War II.)
Josef found three groups among the new prisoners to be especially interesting. First, there was the approximately two million Soviet POWs who on being repatriated to the USSR were arrested there en masse on suspicion of collaboration with the Germans. Almost without exception, they were sentenced to long terms in the Soviet death- camps. Tens if not hundreds of thousands must have died. Solzhenitsyn describes the scene in one POW camp, with "the evening mist hovering above a swampy meadow encircled by barbed wire; a multitude of bonfires; and, around the bonfires, beings who had once been Russian officers but had now become beastial creatures who gnawed the bones of dead horses, who baked patties from potato rinds, who smoked manure and were all swarming with lice. Not all these two-legged creatures had died as yet. Not all of them had lost the capacity for intelligible speech, and one could see in the crimson reflections of the bonfires how a belated understanding was dawning on those faces which were descending to the Neanderthal." (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Harper & Row, 1973], p. 218; quoted in Vuk, Paul, "Case Study: Soviet Prisoners-of-War [POWs], 1941-42," GIEF/Gendercide Watch, n.d., www.gendercide. org.) Josef tried to reach out to the members of this population who were at the camp, but had little success. Not only was he a German soldier, but the Russian prisoners, especially the officers, were probably more guarded than any other group in the camp.
The second group contained Soviet teens and early 20s, as well as those who had been in the gulag system since childhood. For years, the gulags had swept the very young into their gaping maws. In addition to being in the gulags due to their parents' presence, children from the age of twelve who committed criminal acts had to be given moderate sentences, at least in the early years. In 1935, however, children from the age of twelve were opened to the full force of adult penalties, including capital punishment. A 1941 decree eliminated the requirement that the crime be committed intentionally. Now they could be convicted based on simple carelessness!
As Solzhenitsyn points out, these children did not fight the system; rather, they joined it. Actually, they outdid it, becoming even more inhuman than the system itself. Fortunately, these horribly damaged human beings were usually kept separate from the rest of the gulag population in separate colonies (for those under fifteen) or together with invalids and women (the senior kids). In both cases, they seemed to turn into brutal, amoral beings, whose only guide was what they wanted. The few who had made they way into Josef's camp were avoided by everyone as utterly unreachable... and about as safe as a juvenile cobra that had found its way into your blankets. On several occasions, Josef tried talking with those in his barracks. He stopped when a seventeen year-old who was sitting next to him suddenly pulled out a knife and killed the teen with whom he was speaking. When one of these prisoners was identified, he or she was placed under a special watch. When the slightest breach of rules, let alone a crime was committed - and, frankly, one did not have to wait long - the youngster was immediately separated from the rest of the population and shipped off to another prison as soon as possible. Given the system, what else could be done?
A variety of commentators have spoken to the destructive effect of camp policies upon the quality of the inmates' lives. For example, they have suggested that a lack of food and lack of sleep led to narrowing the focus of their lives, to feelings of inferiority, and to marked reductions in their sex drive. The introduction of a third group of new prisoners served as something of an elixir. As was the case with 19th century "snake oils," it surely didn't CURE prisoner problems, but it did make many of them FEEL better, at least for a while!
As Stalin culled the Soviet population for more and more fuel for his gulags, one of his interminable sweeps brought a large number of adolescents into the camps. Note that these were not any adolescents, but, rather, homosexual adolescents. Note also that these gay adolescents did not represent the entire span of homosexual "types." Rather, they represented a narrow band of homosexuals, specifically, the "flaming queens"! Dear God! They minced, they swished, they lisped, and they squealed - they spent endless hours on their hair and their makeup - but never, never did they allow the dispirited prisoner to drown in his despair! Indeed, the worse the prisoner seemed to feel, the more determined this group was to flirt and convince him that something in life was sweet. (Yes, the fact that they were single-minded in their determination to taste it sometimes caused problems! The fact remained that in having to deal with them, some men came out of their shells for the first time in years!)
Just before they were to be moved to another camp, Josef spoke with the young queen who flamed the brightest of them all, thanking "her" for all the good she had done in the barracks and the camp. He would not quickly forget the wet kiss she placed on his cheek or her comment, "Well, dearie, we all do what we can do. Toodle oo..."
Josef looked up when the guard entered the barracks to take her and her friends to the administration building for processing. My God, it was DROOG, the young Red Army guard he had met on his way up the Volga on the way to Siberia. What in the world was he doing in the NKVD?
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. PROFESSOR KENYON (10 Cs): In queue.