Chad Thumann - The Undesirables

It wasn’t until two days later that search crews found the wreckage hundreds of miles away, in an Everglades swamp. Bobby hoped Hank and his instructor had been killed on impact, because alligators had devoured their bodies.

Hank’s death shocked Bobby into reality. He had volunteered for a dangerous if not deadly duty, sure, but he’d always assumed that his own intelligence and competence would keep him alive. Hank’s fate demonstrated how random and sudden death could be.

Bobby knew Hank wouldn’t be the last. During the course of the war, thousands of cadets would be killed in training. A few weeks of training simply couldn’t prepare would-be pilots for the actual dangers of flight. And even the best, most naturally gifted, pilot could be brought down by bad luck and faulty equipment.

That happened to Parker. By then they were all flying solo and had grown confident in their piloting skills. Parker’s plane developed a leak in its hydraulic system. When his flight returned to base, Parker circled overhead, waiting patiently for his turn to land, never suspecting that every moment was costing him more hydraulic fluid. By the time his turn came, his flaps and wheels locked in place. Parker didn’t even have a chance to eject—the ground was coming up way too fast. Without flaps to act as brakes and without wheels to cushion its fall, the plane disintegrated out from under him.

Bobby himself had a scare when he came out of a cloud and flew head-on into a flock of migrating geese. Three of the big birds slammed into his plane, cracking the windshield of the cockpit and smearing it with blood. One of the two engines went out, its propeller tangled with guts and feathers. Bobby’s plane was crippled, and he had to land completely blind.

He would’ve ended up like Parker if Jack hadn’t saved him. Jack flew right beside Bobby, holding perfect formation, instructing him over the radio in a comforting, reassuring voice. He told Bobby exactly where to go, how far to turn the yoke, how much to pull the throttle, and how best to compensate for the dead engine. Bobby managed a rough but safe landing.

Jack was most likely the reason Bobby’s training group didn’t have even more casualties. Jack was a natural pilot. He flew as though he’d been born with wings, and he seemed to know more about flight than even their instructors. No one knew where or how Jack had learned so much, and the cadet remained tight-lipped about his past. When prodded, Jack simply shrugged his shoulders and said, “Just lucky, I guess.”

Bobby finally wrote about all of this to Karen, despite never hearing from her. He told her about his new friends, the instant camaraderie they shared, and the sudden sense of loss caused by Hank’s and Parker’s deaths. He expressed his love for her, wrote heartfelt admissions about how much he missed her, and apologized for the months when he had given in to despair and stopped writing. He’d thought she’d stopped loving him, he explained, but now he knew better. He knew no mail was getting in or out of Leningrad, and he knew that even these letters might never arrive in her hands. But he had faith that she still loved him and that somehow, some way, they would find each other again.

Bobby wrote to Karen every single night, but he never received a single letter in return.

The day after Karen returned to Leningrad, the sole survivor of the First Potato Army, she visited the Moscovsky Rail Terminal.

East of Leningrad, a critical ice road stretched across vast Lake Ladoga. This was the so-called Road of Life, the only access to the besieged city that was not controlled by the Germans. The Germans tried to dive-bomb and strafe the supply trucks running the road, but the trucks kept coming, kept going. Once safely across the lake, the trucks were unloaded at the town of Osinovets on the lake’s shore, and their cargo was hauled by train to the terminal in Leningrad.

Judging from the amount of traffic in the Moscovsky Terminal, a significant amount of supplies was getting in and out. Karen saw it with her own eyes. She also watched important refugees board outgoing trains to safety. Refugees like Dmitri Shostakovich.

She no longer resented the composer. She no longer blamed him for abandoning her and her father. If she had been offered the chance to evacuate, she would have taken it in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t anyone?

It was why she had come to the rail terminal herself. It was why she watched the trains load and unload. She needed to see the operation. She needed to learn how it worked, because she was certain that soon she, too, would be motoring across the ice to safety.

Two days later, Leningrad’s mayor addressed the citizens over the public-announcement speakers that had been strung throughout the streets. Mayor Popkov reassured his people that the worst was behind them. The mayor announced the creation of the Second Shock Army and the beginning of a major winter offensive that would break the German siege and rescue Leningrad from starvation. In the meantime, they merely had to survive. He admitted that food had become scarce, but he blamed the black market. He warned Leningraders that profiteers would be harshly punished.

The mayor’s words rang hollow. Everyone participated in the black market now. They had to if they wanted to survive. Two hundred grams of bread, the current ration, were clearly not enough to survive on, especially since the bread was cut with sawdust. Those who did somehow manage to survive had to drag the bodies of their loved ones on sledges to mass burial pits. They braved the cold and exhausted themselves in the journey because they knew what would happen to the corpses if they didn’t make the trip—cannibals would eat them. The very thing that had happened to Karen’s father.

Despite the mayor’s words of encouragement, an attitude of rebellion surged through the city. In the weeks that followed, Karen constantly overheard criticism of the government. The Communist Party was accused of hoarding food. Mayor Popkov himself was suspected of purposefully causing the shortage so he could profit. Karen even found anonymous pamphlets brazenly tacked to bulletins that encouraged open revolt. “We need not fear the NKVD,” the pamphlets insisted. “Nor the army. They are our fathers, brothers, and sons. They cannot be compelled to fire on us!”

Karen was less convinced by the revolutionary sentiment of the pamphlet than she was by the mayor’s speech. Meanwhile, the State police, the NKVD, was feared, and with good reason, because it had done far worse than fire on women and children during its brief history. NKVD agents were everywhere in Russia, spying on citizens, noting and recording subversive sentiment or activity. They might not massacre demonstrators in the street, but you could be sure they would round up the organizers afterward and make them disappear, never to be seen or heard from again.

Despite the NKVD, people grumbled in despair and openly criticized their leaders, which was rare in Russia. It indicated a new level of desperation. But that didn’t mean people were willing to march on the Smolny, the seat of the city’s government. For one, they were far too weak to march. Starving citizens make poor revolutionaries.

Things only got worse when the State-run bakeries began to shut down. City officials claimed that it wasn’t a lack of food but a lack of water that caused the closures. Leningrad’s last pumping stations had failed, and without water, the bakeries couldn’t make bread. In an act of remarkable solidarity, cold, starving, and exhausted civilians once again emerged from their homes. They stood in long lines that stretched from the city’s various bakeries to the Neva River. The lines became bucket brigades, passing water hand over hand, delivering it to the bakeries to keep the ovens working. Winter still gripped the city. The temperature was well below zero, and each hand that passed the bucket also had to break the ice forming on its lip to prevent the water from freezing solid before it arrived at the bakery ovens. It was exhausting work. But the purpose it gave to the citizens of Leningrad was also invigorating.

Until she joined those lines, Karen wouldn’t have believed that so many ordinary men and women still survived in Leningrad. And although the work was hard, it kept her warm, as did the body heat of the men and women standing on either side of her. Karen no longer felt alone. For once she felt a part of a greater community, part of a family working together for a greater good.

Everyone else felt the same. Spirits had risen. Somewhere in line a man began to sing. He had a deep, booming voice well suited to patriotic songs. But he wasn’t singing a patriotic song. He was singing a love song. It was a popular show tune intended for a line of chorus girls, so the man’s baritone rendition sounded almost comical. Others immediately joined in, men and women alike. Soon the whole line was singing together. Karen added her own voice, trying to learn the words as she went. But the words weren’t important. The song wasn’t important. The singing was.

Everyone sang louder and louder, and other voices began to echo the song, from other lines, and from Russian soldiers in their trenches. The Germans could hear them now; Karen was sure of it. The Germans could hear and, upon hearing, would know that Russians still breathed in Leningrad, that their strategy of starvation had failed.

It was one of the happiest moments of Karen’s life. Perhaps she wouldn’t have to flee, after all. Perhaps she could survive in Leningrad, if everyone could work together, if everyone could just keep the bakeries open. And as public sentiment swung from despair to optimism, Mayor Popkov made another announcement: the Second Shock Army was enjoying remarkable success. Soon they would link up with the Leningrad defenders at the Nevsky Bridgehead. The ice road across Lake Ladoga was still secure. So tomorrow the bread ration would be increased from two hundred to four hundred grams daily.