Читать книгу Out of the Night - Richard Julius Herman Krebs - Страница 15

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In October, 1923, the day’s wage of a docker in the harbor of Hamburg was seventeen billion marks.

On the night of October 22 all detachment leaders in Hamburg were summoned to a house on Valentinskamp. There were about sixty men present, denoting that our armed communist forces in the district numbered roughly 1,200. Otto Marquardt and his secretary, the elephantine Grete, were present. So were two young Russian officers. But none of them spoke; listening, they hovered in a corner where the light was dimmest. The final instructions were issued by one of Ernst Thaelmann’s aides. There was no enthusiasm. A spirit of silent resignation permeated our meeting. The air was stifling and full of smoke. The faces of the sentries at the door were taut and pale. But we were determined to triumph or to die for the revolution. The meeting broke up with a muffled shout, “Forward! Long live Soviet Germany!”

In a tenement around the corner the detachment couriers, their bicycles parked in a rear court-yard, were waiting. I found my courier, the riveter’s apprentice, in a kitchen, eating a large meal of boiled potatoes and margarine. I ordered him to mobilize my group—Detachment Two of the Red Marines—and to tell the men to assemble outside of the suburban town of Harburg at a certain point on the Hamburg-Bremen railway line at twelve-thirty sharp. The rifles were to be left with a Party member in Eimsbuettel, to be called for later. The boy clattered downstairs, still munching.

Then I took the local train to Harburg, a journey of twenty minutes. The night was dark, windy, but not cold. I felt so hot that I loosened the woolen scarf I wore around my neck and unbuttoned my windbreaker. The Harburg organization had assembled a lot of stolen bicycles in a vacant store a couple of blocks from the station. Here the front door was locked, there were no lights, but a side-door, opening on an alley, was open. Comrades were stationed at the corners to warn against occasional policemen. I received a bicycle and crossed the outskirts. Once out on the highway, I extinguished the light, and followed the railway line until a cluster of long low sheds popped out of the night. A few lanterns drew small circles of yellow light. On a siding stood a few empty freight cars. This was our point of assembly. A dark figure leaped suddenly on the highway and raised an arm.

In the shadows of the empty freight cars huddled a group of local communists. None of them had fire-arms. By midnight sixteen men from my detachment had arrived. Half an hour later two stragglers from another detachment appeared. They had lost their way or misunderstood their directions. Both of them had Belgian pistols. At 12:45 I said:

“Let’s go.”

We surrounded the sheds and overpowered two elderly watchmen. We locked them into a small tool-shed. Their guns, small Mausers, were taken by two local militants. A long freight train approached, and we lay still until it had passed. Then each man did the job he had previously been appointed to do. We had a high degree of beginner’s luck. Two men cut the telegraph wires. Four, with saws and an ax from the tool-shed, felled nearby trees. Another group toiled to dislocate ties and rails. The local communists banded together and pushed a freight car from the siding to the main line of trains bound for Hamburg. Trees, timbers, debris and rocks were heaped on the line. The purpose of this action was to prevent police and troop reinforcements to roll unhindered into Hamburg once the authorities had given the alarm. A lone field policeman who blundered into our midst was immediately disarmed.

In the small hours of morning the city lay quiet. We assembled in the blackness of a small park. Two couriers brought our six rifles from their hiding-place. They were distributed to those who had had rifle experience in previous encounters. We were now twenty-seven strong, including two girls who carried iodine, bandages, scissors and clubs. No one spoke an unnecessary word. Our task was to raid Police Post 42.

We proceeded in two single files, one on each side of the street, hugging the houses. From a public telephone booth I called the police station.

“Come quickly,” I telephoned. “There are three burglars here in a luggage shop.” I gave an address on the far side of the Eimsbuettel district. That would draw part of the police force away from the post.

I directed my detachment to halt a block away from the station. Like ghosts we vanished into the doorways. I sent a youngster ahead to enter the station. He was to ask the police officer in charge to telephone for a doctor—because of a premature birth somewhere in the district. The young comrade soon returned to report that five policemen were in the station. Three of them had hung their gun belts on hooks in the wall, and were playing cards. I was tempted to attack that very moment, but I held back.

The signal for the insurrection came like a thunder-clap. It came in the form of three-men groups who were smashing the street lights. With a feeling as if my skin was shriveling up and going off in all directions, I put two fingers into my mouth and whistled.

From two sides we closed in. That instant I wished I were far away, out at sea on some ship; others later told me that they had the same sensation. But each of us was ashamed to stand back. We rushed at the station building, intent to kill before we ourselves would be killed. It was no bloodless assault. Someone behind me, crazy with excitement, fired his pistol into the air and yelled. That warned the policemen. A window was thrown open. The light in the station went out. The guns barked, blotting out thought.

I saw two of my comrades fall. For a while one of them whimpered like a dog that had been run over. Against the wall of a short hallway, flanked by two guard-rooms, stood two policemen. Stilettos of yellow fire leaped from their hands. Close to the door a young stevedore in a patched gray sweater pulled the release of a hand-grenade. “Stand off,” he said hoarsely. Then he counted, yelled: “Twenty-one . . . Twenty. . . .” Six or seven of us crouched on both sides of the entrance. The grenade roared, and the hallway was free. We sprang forward with the roar of the explosion still in our ears.

Smoke filled the inside of the station. From the floor a policeman was still firing. The stevedore crushed his face with a kick of his heavy boot. Another policeman had the side of his neck torn away; he was bleeding to death under a table. Someone switched on the lights. The three remaining policemen were cornered, their arms raised high.

The stevedore raged: “Shoot them. Kill the whole murderous lot!”

I stopped him. The Party command had ordered us to keep prisoners as hostages. We shackled the policemen together with their own handcuffs. Outside the station a crowd shouted for arms. Men and boys came running from all directions, and a few women from the communist ambulance service. We found a dozen rifles and thirty rounds of ammunition for each, and an equal number of service pistols. There were also some first-aid kits and a machine gun. A middle-aged worker stepped forward when I asked who could use a machine gun. He pulled out his Party book, and said he had served in the war. I gave him the machine gun, and called for volunteers in the crowd to help him mount it on the roof of a house from which three important streets could be dominated. The girls from the ambulance service carried our wounded away. Throughout the city the Party had established first-aid stations in the apartments of sympathizers.

By this time a squad from another Red Hundred, composed of older men, took over the captured station. Others tore up the pavement and erected a barricade; timbers, garbage cans, old furniture obstructed the street. Cursing dispatch-riders lugged their bicycles over the obstructions. The sounds of distant rifle fire filled the night. Within that hour nearly a score of other police posts were stormed by communist detachments in the districts of Hamm, Horn, Barmbeck and elsewhere.

I have often been asked: “What are the thoughts and feelings of a thousand men who set out to conquer a city of more than a million in one onslaught?” The answer is that at first they plunge ahead in a delirium of self-destruction. They cannot believe that they will win, but they would rather die than admit this to themselves. But after their initial success they become, in a way, rational, and their self-confidence grows to monstrous proportions. There was neither fear nor hesitation in our minds. What we did, we felt, was good and right. We did not think of ourselves. We did not anticipate private material gain. We were fanatics prepared to give all, and ask nothing for ourselves. We despised the hoodlums who took advantage of darkness and confusion to loot and maraud for individual profit and pleasure.

A band of such hoodlums was looting a number of stores. A squad of communists gave them battle. The goods in the stores were now the property of the working class, and looting had become a crime. From an apartment in the rear of a store came piercing cries for help. Three or four men from my column forced their way into the apartment. After a while they returned and reported: Two plunderers had surprised a girl in her bed. One of them had grasped the girl’s wrists and the other raped her. My comrades had yanked the two into the now empty store.

“You made them cold, I hope?” I said. I heard no shots.

“With bayonets,” one of the comrades answered.

We advanced, keeping close to the houses. There was no time to lose. It was still dark, and the surprise element is greatest in the hours before dawn. We moved toward the center of Hamburg. Other columns, I knew, were doing the same from all surrounding points.

Despite the dead and wounded we had lost, my group was stronger now. Clusters of volunteers followed the spearhead. Many streets swarmed with people. Party agitators endeavored to draw people into the streets and to keep them there. Skoblevski’s instructors had made it clear to us that it was important to have crowded streets when fighting took place. Nothing will rouse the wrath of the population so much as police firing into unarmed masses. At intersections, small groups of partisans collected kerosene in garbage cans and heaps of old rags; their task was to stop police lorries with sudden barricades of fire.

At daybreak we met resistance. A strong force of Security Police had entrenched around a small railway bridge, behind nearby trees and in adjoining houses. Their carbines cracked.

“Disperse! To the roofs!”

We dived into the houses on both sides. Doors splintered under carbine butts, and tenants in pajamas and night-shirts fled toward the cellars. Men crouched in windows, on the balconies, on the roofs. As if by common consent, the communist units held their fire. It was the prelude to what Soviet officers had taught us was the “bottling up” maneuver.

The police did not walk into the trap. We settled down to an hour of sniping. The machine guns of the police blasted away at anything that moved in the street. We tried to work ourselves toward the enemy by advancing over the roofs, but we lacked the ropes and ladders necessary to do this with success. A few reckless communists who straddled window sills to take better aim were quickly hit. One roared and spread out his arm, and plunged down from a height of five stories. Lying half in a doorway was a small child, stone-dead.

From the roof of a tenement a hundred yards away came a ringing voice.

“Don’t give up. Hang on!” the voice shouted. “Reinforcements are on the way.”

Communists were marching into Hamburg from all outlying communities. Then came two shrill whistles—the signal for assault. From my perch in an attic window I saw the snipers disappear from other roofs. Voices yelled: “Storm!” I leaped down four flights of stairs into a hallway already crowded with armed partisans. Perhaps one in five had a rifle, one in four a pistol, and the rest carried hammers and spiked clubs.

The signal for assault sounded again.

I and a few others pushed out into the street. Instantly, the screech of whining lead drove us back into the house. The sidewalks were littered with dead and wounded. Gray, fire-spitting things moved forward. Armored cars.

We had been taught how to fight armored cars. Here and there hand-grenades were thrown out of doorways and low windows. Only one of them exploded. The others were dead. The armored cars continued to advance, raking the street. A youth carrying a bottle in each hand darted out of a house, and ran up to the first car. He smashed both bottles against the car, and then was dead. An older man, a bristly-faced scarecrow, now lunged toward the armored car. In the moment of his death he threw a bundle of burning rags on the back of the gray thing. This man—I can never forget him. He was the most pathetic hero of the Hamburg rising. The armored car was enveloped in flame and smoke, and the faster it moved, the brighter the flames became. At the end of the block it stopped. But two others continued, machine guns spitting.

By now I was, with many others, in the street. Police counter-attacked in the shelter of armored cars. A low barricade of cobble-stones at the end of the street stopped them. From a window, a solitary figure took pot-shots at civilians and policemen who attempted to clear away the obstacle. Before waves of attacking police we scattered into side streets. We retreated, scuttling from doorway to doorway, shooting before we ran. Of my detachment, the Red Marines, I saw nothing more. Around me, men I had never seen before, were shooting and yelling. And then we all ran, each man for himself, each man abruptly aware, it seemed, of the paramount task of saving his own skin.

Retreat is the death of any insurrection. What had begun as a concerted assault ended in a desperate defense, in equally desperate but short-lived attacks, and a guerrilla warfare which knew no leaders except those who took charge of haphazardly assembled groups before they were smashed and dispersed a few minutes later.

At Hamburgerstrasse and Bornes Road, in the north-east of the city, following the sound of heavy firing, I found a series of well-constructed barricades. No one seemed to be in command. But in the cover of piled-up benches, trees and stones, and from behind overturned carts and automobiles, members of the Red Hundreds gave battle to police. Others were sniping from windows and roofs of houses which flanked the barricades. In a court-yard, a woman distributed bread and liverwurst. Here was well-organized resistance. I was relieved, and asked for news.

“More police posts have been taken in the Borgfelde and the Uhlenhorst districts,” I was told.

“And the harbor?”

The harbor was decisive.

“The whole harbor is on strike.”

Toward noon, the police brought mortars and mine-throwers into action. We crawled a little way back, and when the thunder and the smoke cleared away, our barricades were wrecked and police pushed forward in the rear of armored cars. There was a lull in the firing.

“Drop your arms,” a policeman barked. “Haende hoch!”

He was shot on the spot. A group of communists advanced to meet the police. Ahead of them they shoved three captured police officers. Nevertheless, the police opened fire. One of the prisoners was instantly killed. The two others ran toward the police. A communist sprang from a doorway, tripped one of the escaping officers and shot him through the back of the head.

Again we retreated, fighting for each house. At dusk I found myself with two comrades on the roof of a garage, holding off a police patrol firing from windows on the opposite side of the Street. Our fronts had broken up. All forces were scattered. Sounds of shooting came from all directions. A block down the street a group of Red Guards carrying wounded comrades was taken prisoner.

I was glad when it grew dark. One of the men on the garage roof was hit. The other jumped to the street and ran screaming into the arms of the police. I slid down into a back-yard and entered the back door of the next house. It was a restaurant. I rushed through the restaurant, left it by the front door, and crossed into another street. The street was empty. I ran into a house and knocked at the door of an apartment.

A white-haired woman with a kind, wrinkled face opened the door. She looked at the pistol in my hand.

“What do you wish?” she asked serenely.

“Let me in.”

“Better wash yourself,” the woman said.

I did. She gave me coffee and bread and butter. My clothes were badly torn. The woman gave me an old overcoat.

“Take it,” she said. “I’ve kept it eight years now, ever since my husband died.”

I put on the overcoat. It was too small, but it was all right.

“I’m going to leave my arms here,” I said.

“Yes, leave them here,” the woman agreed, adding: “I shall throw them away the first chance I get.”

“What happened today in the center of the city?”

“I know only little. Armed bands tried to loot the big stores while the fighting went on in the suburbs.”

“Did you see a newspaper?”

“No,” she said nervously. “You must go away now.”

I went into the street. Posters on the walls ordered all citizens to leave the streets by eleven o’clock. Barbed-wire barricades, guarded by steel-helmeted police, blocked important intersections. At several points I was stopped and searched by police patrols.

“Leave me alone,” I said. “I come from work. I want to go home.”

“Why is your face burned?”

“There was a fire in the house.”

“Well, don’t go west,” a policeman advised. “Hell is loose in Barmbeck.”

I could still hear the sounds of rifle fire interspersed with heavier explosions. I wondered what the Party was doing in Berlin, in Saxony, in Silesia, elsewhere. Like my comrades, I took it for granted that the Red Hundreds had gone into battle all over Germany.

Avoiding the patrols, I made my way westward. I walked for hours. On the edge of the great proletarian district of Barmbeck, the bedlam of battle was louder than ever. Police trucks full of prisoners rumbled by. The prisoners sat on the floors of the trucks, their arms raised high. Police were shooting from the houses, from armored cars, from behind sandbags piled up in the street. I circled northward around the fighting zone. The streets were quieter. Stores showed light, and there was even music in a few small cafés. There were young working-men and girls who held each other close and laughed. I entered a café for a glass of beer. People drew away from me, and were suddenly silent.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

They gave no answer. I hated them. The noises of slaughter less than a mile away were in the room. I drank the beer. When I went out, I slammed the door and the glass panel splintered. Cautiously I approached the zone of fighting.

I hailed a man who passed on a bicycle. I was not mistaken; he was a courier.

“How’s the situation?”

“Bad.”

The Reichswehr command had decreed the death penalty for disobedience to the authorities. It was rumored that the German navy was steaming for Hamburg. More than nine hundred communist partisans had been arrested during the fighting. The police recaptured most of their stations, after driving out the defenders with gas and mines.

“Let me ride with you,” I said.

“Can’t—I must be off.”

A thought burned in my brain: “If the insurrection in other parts of the country has failed, we in Hamburg are lost.” The masses, idle in strike, were not willing to fill the gaps of our ranks. The communist vanguard fought. The masses were passive. Perhaps the workers really did not want a revolution? I brushed the doubts aside. A skirmish line blocked the street ahead.

“Halt! Where to?”

“Red Marines.”

A sentry held a flash-light into my face. “Pass,” he said.

The vicinity of Pestalozzi Street was an armed communist camp. On the sidewalks columns were re-formed and received their orders. In the van of a couple of hundred silent marchers, I saw Johnny Dettmer, the gun-runner of previous months. Almost all the men seemed well armed. At another spot, raiding parties were formed to attack the harbor. Special squads formed by men of Hugo Marx’s Apparat were on the way to offer their services as volunteers to the police, to plant themselves in our enemy’s camp. The police, it was known, were organizing a Buergerwehr, an auxiliary force of anti-communist citizens. Everyone I saw was going somewhere or doing something. The din of rifles and machine guns, flaring up, diminishing at times, but always loud and disturbing, was only a few hundred yards to the south. Knots of men slept in doorways; they looked at first glance like heaps of corpses. On a corner, shouting violently at a group of dispatch-riders, I saw the short, compact figure of Herrman Fischer, the chief of the first Red Hundred.

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

“Do? Let’s see—Red Marines are off to Geesthacht. Go there tonight. You’ll be four hundred strong. Get hold of the dynamite factory before morning.”

“Can you get me a gun?”

Herrman Fischer laughed. “Disarm a policeman,” he said, “and you’ll have a gun.”

Units of five were assembled for the night march to Geesthacht, an industrial suburb on the right bank of the Elbe. The idea of seizing a dynamite factory animated even the most hungry and weary. Soon we were on the way in small groups, and unarmed, because we had to pass the districts controlled by troops and police.

Without serious mishap we slipped through. One of the bridges which crosses a ship canal running parallel to the river is called the Kornhaus Bridge, and it was for this point that we were heading through a maze of crooked old streets. We came upon two policemen patrolling a little square in front of a church. They had carbines, pistols, bayonets, rubber truncheons, and they wore steel helmets.

Three men are necessary to disarm a policeman—two to hold his arms, the third to cut away his Sam Browne with a sharp knife. In the shadows of a side street we waited until the officers had passed. Then we pounced on them. Now our group was armed. We stripped the policemen of their uniforms and told them to run for it or be shot. They ran. The uniforms we took with us.

A little further on, the street was blocked by a barbed-wire entanglement. We ran for cover, suspecting a trap. Nothing happened. The boldest in our group, a scraggy boiler-maker, crept forward to investigate. The barricade was unmanned. On its other side an automobile without lights had stopped, and a man was trying to pull part of the entanglement aside. The boiler-maker’s guffaw echoed in the silent street.

“Come on,” he said. “These are profiteers.”

The rest of us hastened up to the group on the other side of the barbed wire. The occupants of the car were a pudgy, middle-aged man and a young woman in a fur coat. Between them, with a firm grip on the man’s collar, stood the boiler-maker.

“Look at these beauties,” he said. “Motorcar, fur coat and all.”

Here, we thought, was a true profiteer. We made the man take off his topcoat and his pants. The woman we forced to surrender her fur coat and her shoes. She was calm, but her escort shivered like a leaf. He pulled out a wallet and offered to buy back his pants.

“Sure,” the boiler-maker said. He took the wallet, pulled out a wad of bills, tore them in half and threw them into the night. “So much for your money,” he snarled. “Now run or we’ll hang you to a lantern.”

The woman walked off on her toes. The man followed her, lurching from side to side as if drunk. We pushed the car into the barbed wire, and overturned it.

We occupied the boat-landing beneath the Kornhaus Bridge and waited. A tall blue-eyed youngster from another unit had donned one of the police uniforms and had gone to the Baumwall a half mile away to hire a water taxi, a Barkasse. We posted a sentry up street to warn us should police approach. Armed platoons on motor trucks passed twice. Each time we darted into the public comfort station beneath the quay. Finally the peaceful chugging of a motor told us that a launch was coming along the canal. It drew alongside the landing. The young communist in police uniform held his pistol pressed against the spine of the launch captain. The launch was about forty feet long, with a small cabin in front of the wheel. We crowded into the cabin. Those who found no room lay down flat in the bottom of the Barkasse. So, with only the steersman and the uniformed comrade visible from the quays, the launch passed through the end of the canal, veered into the broad river and continued upstream. Nearly twenty men were aboard the launch. About four o’clock in the morning we landed on a grassy embankment off Geesthacht. Again we waited, crouched close to the ground, while the boiler-maker slipped away to scout for the points of assembly.

The silence was oppressive. We were too far from Hamburg to hear the sounds of shooting. Presently two girls, muffled to their ears, arrived.

“This way, comrades,” they whispered.

They led us to an abandoned factory. The windows were covered with sacking. Armed guards were on duty behind a breast-work of empty oil drums and piled-up earth. A few girls and women had set up field kitchens with oil stoves. Pea soup and tea in tin bowls were served to all newcomers. Many were too tired to eat; they fell asleep with the spoons in their hands. The dark, bare halls of the factory teemed with activity. Only necessary words were spoken. Squads armed with picks and shovels went out and others returned. Regular trenches were being dug on both sides of the two main highways leading from Hamburg to Geesthacht.

Dawn came dull and gray. We lined up in front of the factory walls for last instructions from the detachment commanders. The instructions were simple enough—seizure of the railway station, the arsenal, the dynamite factory; arming of the Geesthacht workers and a renewed advance on Hamburg. The final admonition was: “Let no wounded fall into the hands of the police. On to victory!”

In the chill morning we attacked. The trenches crossing the highways were well manned to prevent the penetration of police or troops from Hamburg. We advanced in four columns, each with its own important objective. I was assigned to the force which was to raid the dynamite factory; exhausted as I was, I did my duty as a good soldier of the revolution.

Small assault groups went ahead to disrupt the communication lines of the defenders, and to test the strongest points in the defense of the main buildings. We had planned a surprise coup, but it was we who were surprised. The resistance was fierce. Soon rifles cracked from the windows of workers’ dwellings and from the roof on the rambling factory. We gained ground slowly through back-yards and gardens, and worked ourselves through many of the small one-family houses that skirted the factory area. An armored lorry was stopped with two hand-grenades. By the time our squad faced the factory gates, half of our number had fallen in the fire.

The day turned into a nightmare. I saw a girl from the communist first-aid columns who had followed us to tend the wounded. Her mouth and chin were half torn away by a slug, and she was still whimpering. We did not take the dynamite factory. We were pressed back into the trenches which followed the crest of a low hill, and there we held out until the afternoon.

Airplanes droned overhead, dropping leaflets first, and then blazing away with machine guns. “Surrender,” the leaflets said. “Resistance is useless.” That I knew, and so did every other man in the trench. But we had no thought of surrender. We would fight until we were dead. Mortars thundered and threw sheets of rock and mud on our heads. And then came a new, dreaded noise: the juicy hammering of heavy machine guns. Terrified shrieking followed.

“The navy! The navy!”

We had believed in the revolutionary tradition of the navy. We had hoped that our propagandists would cause a naval revolt when the order was given to shoot on workers. We were mistaken. We saw the blue uniforms run, throw themselves to the ground, rise and run again. They were sailors from a destroyer flotilla that had slipped upriver early in the morning.

Here and there a communist threw away his gun and ran. More followed, and then we all abandoned our arms and ran. We ran like hunted hares in all directions. The “hurrahs” of the sailors sounded menacing and hollow as they charged with bayonets fixed.

Fleeing communists asked one another: “Where do we concentrate? Where is the command?”

“Don’t know,” was the invariable answer. “Get a breathing spell, and keep on fighting till we know what’s happened in Berlin.”

Berlin? Berlin was calm. A message from Zinoviev had postponed the revolution. Every third member of the Hamburg Party machine was either dead or wounded or in jail.

But the Party is like an animal with seven lives. After our rout in Geesthacht, I was hidden with three others in the home of a partisan when a Party courier, combing through the houses of sympathizers, brought orders from Otto Marquardt’s staff to assemble in the suburb of Ahrensburg. We headed toward Hamburg, each man alone. Some went by boat, some followed by rails, and others trudged along the roads. Many were arrested by police patrols on the way.

On Thursday, the third day of the rising, shooting continued all through the night, single shots, and now and then, a strong fusillade or a burst of machine gun fire.

Off a street called Wandsbeker Chaussee I found a worker who had been shot through the stomach. He groaned at regular intervals, and after each groan, he bit into the barrel of his Russian carbine. Passers-by made a cautious circle around the fallen man and hurried on. I picked him up and carried him around a corner, in the hope of finding a friendly house. I had never been in this section of the city before. I dragged the wounded man into a gap between two houses and tried to speak to him to find out who he was. He could not answer. Like all of us, he had left his identification papers at home. I fell asleep behind three garbage cans, and when I awoke toward the morning, the worker was dead. I dragged the corpse back to the street, and propped him against a wall so that a cruising ambulance could find him. Then I took his rifle; only two cartridges were left.

Ahrensburg, just outside Hamburg on the railroad to Luebeck, was mainly in the hands of Red Hundreds. Headquarters was the railway station. Men slept on the stone floor and others trampled over them without heed. A stocky man was in charge, and a mad plan was afoot.

The plan was to seize the central railroad station of Hamburg, which had a commanding position. Eight important thoroughfares ended at the station. Spies had been sent to find out the strength of police and troops guarding the terminal. The stocky man wanted to fill a local train with armed men, run it into Hamburg, and overwhelm the station. A new consignment of Russian rifles had arrived from Luebeck.

“Once you’re inside, massacre every uniform you see,” the stocky man said.

A thin communist with a meek face and a drooping mouth protested. “Do you want to murder us all?” he cried. “Go tell Thaelmann and Brandler and Lenin to storm the damned station themselves.”

The stocky man pushed the defeatist against a door.

“Hold still, my boy,” he murmured.

In a flash he drew his pistol and shot the thin man through the head.

A murmur went up and a few “Bravos.” Many of us crashed our rifles to the floor. I was sick of it, and so were others. For a minute it seemed that comrade would murder comrade.

“We’re through,” someone said.

The argument stopped when a scout arrived from the Hamburg station. He reported two hundred policemen hidden in the waiting rooms. New posters in the city squares had the caption: “Persons bearing arms against the government are subject to the death penalty.”

Resistance had become a farce. We had no leaders. Demoralization took its course. Isolated rebel units, still fighting out of sheer stubbornness and, perhaps, a craving for revenge, retreated along the Luebeck road. The vast majority, broken, bedraggled, disgusted, sauntered away, each man leaving the next to shift for himself.

“What did we get out of it?” one of my companions asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I wish I knew,” the other mumbled forlornly.

A skirmish line of policemen bore down the street.

“We’d better separate,” I proposed.

“All right.”

We parted. I felt as if I should never be happy again or enthusiastic about anything as long as I lived. So much bloodshed and suffering! It made a man want to turn his face to the clouds and roar, so great was the pain. For what? When I entered the Café Bunte Kuh in St. Pauli above which I had rented a shabby little room, someone pointed me out to a police patrol. There was no chance to flee. The people were hostile. Even the prostitutes mocked me. “To the gallows with him,” one of them repeatedly chanted, swinging an empty beer-glass. A policeman held me in a grip that threatened to break my arm. So I was led to the police post on the Davidstrasse.

The small jail was overcrowded. The cells were packed with arrested men, and new arrivals were herded into the guard rooms which were so crowded that men stood on each other’s feet. The usual organized rowdyism of a band of communists in jail found no response in this gathering. A dismal stench filled the place, faces were surly or stoic, and except for the ribaldry of a few intoxicated sailors, men spoke in whispers. After a wretched hour I was called out and pushed aboard an open truck together with many other prisoners. On the rear end of the truck, his carbine across his knees, sat a policeman. We sat on the floor boards, hands raised above our heads, while the truck sped toward the headquarters of the Security Police.

The policeman on the rear end of the lorry was young, and his face was gaunt and sunken from lack of sleep. On the way, the prisoner next to him, a gorilla of a man, lashed out at the guard with both feet. Both pitched to the pavement. The truck stopped, its siren twittering for aid. A policeman jumped down from the front seat, his pistol drawn.

“Nobody move,” he commanded.

The next instant he began to shoot. We tumbled off the lorry in a welter of arms and legs, and sprinted away in all directions. The street in which the truck had stopped was long and straight and narrow, but to the left lay the ancient section of Hamburg, a labyrinth of alleys, crooked passages and crumbling houses. The denizens of the Gaengeviertel—the alley quarter—prostitutes, pimps, criminals and down-and-outers of every description, hated the police and helped the hunted.

I emerged after dark. That night I spent in the apartment of Erika Zcympanski. Other fugitives were there, two wounded, and all utterly exhausted. We slept on the floor like dead men. Erika, after a sleepless night, was as good-looking and practical as ever. She had summoned a communist physician to treat the wounded. The touch of her firm, cool hand as it stroked over a face hot with fever and crusted with dirt, was like a fairy tale come true. Blood and filth could not affect her. Those who could, departed after a bath and a breakfast of coffee, butter and rolls. The morning papers reported that four hundred dead and wounded had been counted in hospitals and morgues; one-third of the known casualties were policemen. An unknown number of communist casualties were still hidden away in the homes of partisans.

“The police will be after me,” I told Erika. “I must get away.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’m going back to sea.”

“Never forget the cause you fought for,” she said. “You can keep up contact with the Party through me.”

I left Hamburg in the afternoon. On a corner people were scrutinizing a new bill which showed the figure one followed by twelve zeros—a thousand billion marks on one piece of paper. Life on the streets was orderly and quiet. The church-bells rang for the burial of the dead.

Eleven days I was on the road, wandering toward the Rhine. I begged food from peasant women and slept in barns. I crossed the river Weser at Minden and entered Holland at night over the frontier town of Gronau. The next night, curled up in a meadow, I almost froze to death. But the following day, in the town of Arnhem, I saw a barge captain loading his craft with new red bricks. I asked him if I could help.

“Yes,” he replied.

I helped him to load the barge, and for this he granted me a slow passage down the north arm of the Rhine to Rotterdam.