Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 10:19:32 -0500
From: carl_mason@comcast.net
Subject: JOSEF'S FORGE - 7

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.