Captivity after victory

He took Berlin in 1945, and in 1992 he ended up in Hamburg

Hamburg. 2001
“Sometimes I feel like the world has gone crazy.” Listen, boy! I am eighty-two years old, and I, who reached Berlin in 1945, am now sitting with you on a bench in a Hamburg park. Listen, the rosy-cheeked Frau serves me a sausage with “bier” and, hearing my mediocre German, grumbles something about the proliferating emigrants in their good Fatherland! This is not normal,” he muttered while sitting with me in an open-air cafe shortly before May 9. His German was like the babble of a first-grader: “Frau, bitte, ein bier. Danke shein, Frau...”

Suddenly, he opened his washed rag cloak and showed off an entire iconostasis of military orders and medals, and this was done in the same gesture as twenty years ago a small farmer offered to buy an imported shirt under the counter... Carefully, looking around, my interlocutor whispered: “I wore them, and will wear them until I die, and they will bury me with these awards. Do you understand? And let the Jewish community, through which I ended up here, constantly tell me that with these orders I insult our German masters. Just think about it, they really are the masters! I still won't remove the award. True, I have to hide them under this rag... But I won’t take them off!” - and the old man cried silently.

Kharkov region. 1942
Thirteen-year-old Pashka Fainstein has been sitting in an abandoned house for several days now, where his mother is dying on a creaking bed. She, sometimes coming to her senses, asks him: “Pashenka, you should go to the Germans, maybe they will give you something to eat... And me I would bring something...” Afterwards, having again fallen into impenetrable delirium, he calls Pashka’s sister, six-year-old Lisa. But mom doesn’t know that Pashka buried Liza two days ago, throwing her little body in dead wood right behind the house. She died of hunger... In recent days, Lisa no longer asked for food, but remained silent, staring at the ceiling and clutching a rag doll to herself. Sometimes she called dad... They hadn’t seen their father since the day he left for the military registration and enlistment office last summer.

Pashka, realizing that his mother needed to be fed with at least something, got out of the house and headed to the neighboring village, since in the village where they had been living for several months, he had searched every corner - everything that was possible had already been eaten. Soon the boy was lucky; in one of the abandoned houses, Pashka discovered several dried potatoes. On the way to his lair, he could not resist taking a bite of a hard and tasteless potato, and he began to feel sick. When he reached the house and entered the little room, the mother was dead. He understood this immediately. Pashka has already learned to distinguish death at first sight. He was unable to drag his mother's body behind the house where he buried his sister, and had to leave her on the bed. Pashka silently ate the potatoes and, closing the door, left.

Hamburg. 2001
“You know, you’re a journalist, you travel all over the world,” my interlocutor continued, “so explain why I’m in such pain!” After my sister and mother died in my arms, my father died in captivity in a concentration camp, and I went through the entire war, I have to hear German speech every day, walk along these streets, be afraid to put on medals, and on May 9th, on the sly of my neighbors, drink a front-line hundred. ! Of course, you can blame me for the fact that twenty years ago I myself applied to leave and moved to Germany for permanent residence. But how can you live on those fifty-three “old” rubles that the USSR paid me? Of course, now I understand that I did the biggest stupidity of my life by leaving for Germany, but the train has left and nothing can be returned - there is nothing there, at home. The apartment was left to some distant relatives, my passport is German, all my friends had already died - they were older than me. I've been fighting since I was thirteen...

The worst thing for me is having to go to the Ordnungsamt. This is something like our social security, only in German. You come there, stand in line for half a day with Turks, Arabs and Africans, go into the office, and there is a German so young and well-groomed, wearing gold-rimmed glasses. He reads the name from the letters and asks so disgustedly: “Well, what do you want?” And I immediately, stumbling from German to Russian, explain to him that it’s already spring and it’s time for me to buy summer clothes. They, the Germans, give pensioners and the unemployed five hundred euros annually for summer and winter clothes.

The last time this same German gave me a check for only four hundred and said that for me this was already too much, I had no prospects and did not represent any value for the great Germany. This is understandable, because everything is written down in my documents about the war and about awards. He flipped through my papers and clicked something on the computer. And he doesn't look at me. He speaks through his teeth. Well, of course, I took everything, said goodbye to him, “Danke, Herr”... And I sideways from the office. If only they didn't take the money back. How embarrassing. And our young people, who went to Germany after college, are happy to accept German money.

Kharkov region and beyond everywhere. 1942-1945
Pashka Fainshtein walked through the front line and joined our tank brigade, hungry, ragged and angry. So he remained the son of the regiment. He was wounded twice, went on reconnaissance missions, and received five state awards. Pashka Fainstein was responsible for killing dozens of Germans. The gray-haired boy, clenching his teeth, destroyed the fascists with such frenzy that he even caused apprehensive surprise among his comrades. Those who were older understood that the boy was taking revenge for his mother, father and sister, and those who were younger simply shied away from him. And in May of 1945, sixteen-year-old Pashka rode into Berlin on tank armor. The last award “For the capture of Berlin” was received personally from the hands of the commander.

And then Pashka ended up in Moscow, spent two years in an orphanage, then the workers' school and the First Medical School. Graduated with honors, worked in military hospitals and special hospitals for senior government officials. A dissertation, several smart books co-authored with academicians (point five did not allow without co-authorship). Later a doctorate. I even had the opportunity to consult Brezhnev himself a couple of times... And then pension, loneliness, empty cold apartment, need. He never started a family. Some subconscious fear of a new war got in the way - it doesn’t hurt so much to die alone. And in 1992, when Gaidar’s reform “ate up” even those meager savings that he, like all pensioners, regularly put into a savings book, Pashka, now of course Pavel Georgievich Fainstein, spat, drank a hundred grams, and took the documents to OVIR. As a Jew, and also a victim during the war (how is the wording?), he was immediately given a residence permit in Germany, a minimum pension and a modest apartment in Hamburg. And he left. That's where we met him.

Hamburg. 2001
- You know, journalist, I’m very scared here... to die. After all, next to me will be buried, perhaps, those who drove my father into the gas chamber, or the children of those whom I personally “determined” near Smolensk or near Prague. Cruel? I myself know that it’s cruel, and I can’t help but think about it. It gnaws at me... Every minute, every second this pain is with me. But in general, everything here is good, blissful - clean streets, enough pension to keep you from starving to death, everyone is polite and smiling. Only something bad appears in the eyes of the Germans when they see my orders. They hide their eyes.

The eighty-two-year-old son of the regiment, Pashka, waved his hand to me and, without saying goodbye, shuffled to the bar counter under the canopy. And I heard his rattling voice, with difficulty finding German words: “Frau, bitte. Ain bir...Yes, no change here... Danke shein, Frau!”

PS All names, titles and facts given in this material are real.