Victory Square by Olen Steinhauer Read Free Book Online Page B

Committee overreacted to a bomb that destroyed a fertilizer plant in Krosno, back on November fifth—the thirty-second anniversary of the short-lived 1956 general strike that, in the end, led to Agota’s father’s internal exile.
    After two days, though, the roadblocks had been removed, and the government never spoke of it again. Perhaps Tomiak Pankov thought we would forget.
    We reached Tisavar a little before three. Ferenc and I, whenever something required a private meeting, always came here, to a point just within the ring of his allowed movement, an hour south of the Capital, just before Kisvarda. Before the Great Patriotic War, Tisavar had been a tiny Jewish-Slav enclave that had survived and even prospered under the Austro-Hungarian government as a market town for the farmers in the nearby region. In the thirties, the mayor decided it was time for a change, and he began lobbying the between-wars government for subsidies to start building cooperative granaries. The government agreed, but before the money could make it there, the Germans marched in. Then Tisavar disappeared.
    The Wehrmacht appeared in May 1939, having quickly overrun our little army. My father died in those short battles and was soon followed by my mother. At the time, I was living in the south, in Ruscova, with my grandparents, who had fled the soldiers in the Capital. The Occupation, for me, was largely about boredom. I was an anxious, too ambitious boy surrounded by dull farmers. Up around Tisavar, though, the Nazi presence was felt strongly. Soldiers patrolled the streets, and officers took over the administrative house, controlling the flow of money and property and Jews.
    The region was governed by Major General Karloff Messerstein, a delinquent from Thuringen who had joined the Nazi Party during its beer-hall days. He administered the region as if it were his private fiefdom, and, perhaps inevitably, some of the headstrong Tisavar boys used munitions left over from our short-lived war to blow up Messerstein’s car in 1942.
    The major general survived with burns and a broken leg, and from his hospital bed directed the retribution.
    Early on in the Occupation, the Germans had enlisted the help of malcontents from our Ukrainian population. These young men had been promised that, once the war was won, the eastern half of our country (including the Capital) would be returned to the Ukraine as a state within the greater German Reich. The fools believed it, because they wanted to. Messerstein decided that, given their local knowledge and natural animosity for these westerners, his Ukrainian recruits would be ideal for the job.
    They first emptied the houses and led the townsfolk to what would later be called Anti-Fascism Hill, on the north side of town. There, over the space of two days, the entire population was executed and buried. Then, using a tank borrowed from a nearby Panzer division, they destroyed the stone administration buildings, then systematically burned every house. As an added touch, Major General Karloff Messerstein arrived on crutches to personally supervise the delivery of two truckloads of Hungarian salt, which were spread over the embers.
    All of this was in our history books, and people in the region never forgave the Ukrainian minority its role in the event. The irony, which the textbooks never mentioned, was that a week after the massacre, Messerstein died naturally of a cerebral hemorrhage.
    Now, all that was left was a memorial in the middle of a swath of barren earth. It was placed here by Mihai during a 1951 ceremony, filmed by camera crews from all over the world. A statement on a bronze plaque attached to a stone pedestal, followed by a few lines from our national poet, Rikard Pasha:
    HERE MARKS THE SPOT WHERE TISAVAR WAS
DESTROYED BY THE FASCIST MENACE ON
8 OCTOBER 1942.
     

A world like leaves of the impossible creation from God’s mind.
All we can hope for is a dream made clear before we die.
     
    No one, not even