1944 (Part IX)

With a crafty move I took out the weapon along with the spare magazine from the black holster. Armed with my right hand hiding the weaponry under my garments, I ran out of the vestry.

After some five good minutes of running from the church, there was a wild, fairly deep gorge, parallel to the main country road. It could have been some old passageway of the not so far Dniester River or the remains of one of the great floods.

Expecting success in the entire precisely planned action, the previous day I prepared everything exactly. Because the gully served for the local residents partly as a sort of garbage receptacle, I hung on a string from the hazel hornbeam growing from the very bottom several dozen old, unusable pots I found there.

Overexcited and not having much time, at a distance of twenty five big steps, being exactly measured and marked the previous the previous day, I, after all an eleven year old punk, took all fifteen shots.

Each of the two magazines had seven bullets, and the fifteenth, being de facto the first of the fifteen, found itself in the barrel of the locked and loaded pistol. As I shot, the systematically punctured pots began to jump and hit each other, so that quickly they turned from stationary to very moving targets.

When I had spent the last of the ammunition, and this happened unexpectedly quickly, wanting as quickly as possible to return to the vestry, I made off running up hill.

Suddenly I heard the shout FAFLUCKTER and at the very edge of the gully I saw up and ahead of me standing with a wide stance some very strange German.

This was not a pleasant discovery, but in a moment I oriented myself that this apparent German was actually none other than my own new colleague, the hydrocephalic altar boy.

Wanting to play a stupid joke on me, he changed into the cape of one of the soldier-altar servers and took the parade officer cap of the chaplain himself, which he had to hold with his hand, because it barely stayed put at the tip of his head. The shout “fafluckter” was, I knew, the only word which this dummy knew in German.

Hastily we returned to the church. The entire way, warning him and waving the empty pistol in front his nose, I explained seriously, that if he told anyone even one word about this, then I would immediately shoot him like a dog.

In the vestry hung a clock. To the end of Mass I had almost twenty minutes left. I cleaned the pistol exactly with a wire brush, which was in the encasement near the place for the spare magazine.

Knowing that I had been mischievous and afraid of some more serious consequences, the entire next week I lived through rather nerve rackingly. The next Sunday the chaplain’s weapon, as if nothing had happened, plainly, as always with fifteen bullets, hung in its place during the German mass.

To the day of our departure every Sunday I managed a solid shooting session. I think now that the naïve Mayer-Walzer, for sure a quiet opponent of Hitler, which in these times and in these circles no longer belonged to rarity, seeing every week serious gaps in his ammunition was convinced and even satisfied that in this way he was supporting the anti-Hitlerite underground.

The chaplain’s pistol—Sauer und Sohn 38 H caliber 7.65 mm—was identical to the two pistols I found in the basement of the German bank which currently protected my cash resources.