Sveta wrote to Lev with her news. She had been offered a permanent job at the library.
They won’t find anybody better than me. I know the layout of the rooms, the cupboards in the rooms and the shelves … I know the periodicals inside out, and with my knowledge of the Roman alphabet I can work out the month, year, name and price of any journal in any language except Chinese … I have a head on my shoulders which may not be filled with the finest brains but is not filled with cotton wool either … Vera Ivanovna said that I’d be group manager in a year. If I wanted to stay at the library my whole life, this would be a good start to a career. But I don’t want to spend my whole life there so … on Monday I’ll say no.
Lev, don’t worry about my health. I told you that either my mood depends on my condition or my condition depends on my mood. At any rate, you’ll be able to see from my handwriting that I’m calm and untroubled, which means that I’m not in any pain or ill with anything. Mama says that I have tuberculosis. Her reason – my weight loss. But you know, with the kind of diet I’ve had it would be difficult to expect anything else, and I don’t have any other symptoms.
In June 1941, Lev was due to go with his FIAN colleagues on a second expedition to Mount Elbrus. On the morning of Sunday 22 June his team was at the institute, finishing its preparations for the trip. Lev was in excellent spirits. He had just passed his final exams at the university and had been told by the faculty committee assigning jobs to graduates that he was one of just four students chosen to go on to FIAN for research on the cosmic rays project. Sveta had returned to the Physics Faculty, now a year behind, and they were happy together. Lev and his colleagues were packing the final pieces of equipment when the leader of their team came in. ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘Have you heard the radio?’ At noon that day there had been a special broadcast by Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister. ‘Today, at 4 o’clock in the morning,’ he had announced in a trembling voice, ‘German forces descended on our country, attacked our frontiers in many places, and bombed our cities – Zhitomir, Kiev, Sevastopol, Kaunas and others.’
The German assault was so powerful and swift that it took the Soviet forces completely by surprise. Stalin had ignored intelligence reports of German preparations for an invasion, and the Soviet defences were in total disarray. They were easily overrun by the nineteen Panzer divisions and fifteen motorized infantry divisions that spearheaded the German invasion force. The Soviet air fleet lost over 1,200 aircraft during the first morning of the war, most of them destroyed by German bombers while they were parked on the ground. Within hours German special forces had advanced deep into Soviet territory and were cutting telephone lines and seizing bridges in preparation for the main attack.
That afternoon the Komsomol of Moscow University called a meeting in the auditorium and unanimously passed a resolution to mobilize the entire student body for the defence of the country. Everybody wanted to sign up. By the end of June, more than a thousand students and teachers had enrolled in the 8th (Krasnopresnenskaia) Volunteer Artillery Division, including around fifty from the Physics Faculty. Lev was among them. ‘There’s a fair amount of confusion here at the moment,’ he wrote to Sveta’s family from the assembly point on 6 July, ‘so I can’t tell you anything definite about our prospects. The only thing that’s more or less known is that we are going to be living and studying here until we’re called up for military service by the draft board.’
Lev was shaken by the outbreak of the war. For the first few days he could not conceive what it would mean. His research, his life in Moscow, his relationship with Sveta – everything was now up in the air. ‘We are at war,’ he kept saying to himself in disbelief.
Although he had volunteered to go to the front, Lev was worried about taking a position of responsibility. Stalin’s terror had left the Soviet forces desperately short of officers, and novices like Lev were being called upon to lead men into battle. After only two years of military training, Lev had reached the rank of junior lieutenant, which meant he could be placed in charge of a platoon of thirty men, but he had no confidence in his tactical abilities. In the end he was given the command of a smaller supply unit made up of six students and two older men from the university. He felt happier about being in a unit of students, inexperienced people like himself, who, he thought, would be more forgiving than a soldier from the working class if he made a mistake.
Lev’s unit was to move supplies from the Moscow stores to a communications battalion at the front. There were two truck-drivers, two labourers, a cook, an accountant and a storeman under his command. As they drove towards the front, they saw scenes of chaos that belied the propaganda of the Soviet press. In Moscow it had been reported that the Soviet forces were repelling the Germans, but Lev found them retreating in chaos: the woods were full of soldiers and civilians, and the roads blocked with refugees fleeing east towards Moscow. Untold thousands had been killed. By 13 July Lev had reached the forests near Smolensk, a city under siege by the Germans.
Svetik, we’re living in the woods and I’m doing household chores … I’m supposed to feed everybody here, including the most high-ranking officials, who don’t so much ask for what they want to eat as just shout for it … There are some advantages – relative freedom during trips to stores. Sveta, there’s absolutely nowhere for you to write to me – nobody here knows where we’ll be from one day to the next. The only way of getting news from you is to call in and see you at home during one of our trips. I don’t know when that will be.
On these journeys between Moscow and the front Lev would carry letters for the soldiers and their relatives. He would also see Sveta and her family in between his visits to the army warehouses. There was one trip in July when he missed Sveta but saw her parents, who ‘fed and watered’ him, as he put it in a letter that he left for her; and a second visit in early September, when Sveta had returned to the university. For Lev the connection to her family was almost as important as the time he spent with her; it made him feel that he belonged. On one of these last trips Sveta’s father gave him a piece of paper on which he had written the addresses of four close friends and relatives in various cities of the Soviet Union: these were the people to whom he should turn for help in locating Sveta and her family if they were evacuated from Moscow while he was absent at the front. Although he had never said as much, the paper made it clear that Sveta’s father saw Lev as a son.
There was one last visit to Moscow. Lev knew it was his final chance to see Sveta, because they had warned him at the supply depot that nothing more would be issued to his battalion. Telling his drivers that he would meet them later, Lev ran from the depot to Sveta’s house. She was unlikely to be there – it was the middle of the day – but he went in any case to say goodbye to somebody. Perhaps Sveta’s mother or her sister would be home. Lev knocked on the door. It was opened by Sveta’s mother, Anastasia. Stepping inside the entrance corridor, Lev explained that he was in Moscow only for a few more hours and that he would then be leaving for the front. He wanted to say thank you and goodbye. Lev did not know whether he should kiss her; she had never shown much warmth or emotion. He made a bow and moved towards the door. But Anastasia stopped him. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Let me kiss you.’ She embraced Lev. He kissed her hand and left.
2
Lev set off from Moscow with three trucks carrying supplies for the Krasnopresnenskaia Volunteer Division. When he had left the division a few days before, it had been occupying a position near Viazma, between Moscow and Smolensk, but it was gone when he returned. The front had collapsed as the 3rd and 4th Panzer Groups attacked from the north and south with tanks, guns and aircraft in a rapid pincer movement encircling Viazma. Taken by surprise, the panic-stricken Soviet forces had dispersed into the forests. Without a radio, Lev had no idea how to find his division. No one knew what was going on. There was chaos everywhere.
Lev’s men drove towards Viazma, hoping to locate their divisional command. It was getting dark and t
hey had no map. One of the trucks broke down so Lev went on by foot. Walking on the road through the thick forest, he could hear guns ahead of him. In the early hours of the morning he came to a village where the remnants of his division were engaged in a fierce gunfight with three German tanks, which had moved out of the forest and on to the road. Soon the Soviet artillerymen abandoned their batteries (they had no ammunition left) and the tanks moved slowly forward, entering the village and firing with machine-guns at the houses. Lev, in a field between the tanks and the village, lay down and waited for the tanks to pass by him before running off into the forest. It was only then that he smelt the eau de Cologne: a bullet had smashed the bottle he had been carrying in his coat pocket to use as an antiseptic for minor wounds, but luckily he was unharmed.
Lev walked deep into the woods. Hundreds of Soviet soldiers who had lost their units were all moving in the same direction in between the trees. Lev did not know where he was going. All he had with him was a pistol, a spade and his knapsack. During the day he buried himself in the ground to hide from the Germans. By night he walked towards the east, or what he thought was east, hoping to rejoin the Soviet forces.
At the end of the third night, on 3 October, Lev found himself on the edge of a village occupied by the Germans. He decided to head away from it as soon as darkness fell. Retreating into the forest, he dug himself into a ditch, covered himself with branches and went to sleep. A sharp pain under his knee woke him. Peering through the branches, he could see in front of him what he thought was a single German soldier with a rifle. Impulsively, Lev got out his pistol and took a shot at him. As soon as he had fired he received a heavy blow on the back of the head. There were two soldiers: the one who hit him on the head had been poking him with his bayonet to see if he was alive or dead. Lev was disarmed and taken back to the village.
He was not alone. Tens of thousands of Soviet troops were trapped in the German encirclement of Viazma during the first week of October. Lev was brought to a transit camp, Dulag (Durch-gangslager )-127, on the outskirts of Smolensk, where several thousand prisoners were crammed into the unheated buildings of a former Soviet military store. There Lev, like the others, was given just 200 grams of bread a day. Hundreds died from cold and hunger or from typhus, which spread in epidemic proportions from November, but he survived.
In early December Lev was part of a contingent of twenty prisoners transferred from Dulag-127 to a special prison near Katyn. The contingent was made up of educated people from Moscow, mostly scientists and engineers. They were imprisoned in a building that Lev thought must have been a school or possibly a clinic before the war. There were four large rooms on either side of a corridor –with up to forty prisoners in each – and a large room at the end where the guards lived. The prisoners were well treated: they were given meat, soup, bread; and their work duties were relatively light. At the end of the third week, Lev and his fellow Muscovites were joined by a small group of well-dressed Russians who were drinking vodka given to them by the guards. In a drunken moment one of them let slip that they had been trained as spies; they had just returned from behind the Soviet lines and were being rewarded for their work. A few days later they departed for Katyn.
Shortly afterwards, Lev and half a dozen other Muscovites were taken to the spy school in Katyn, where a Russian-speaking German captain proposed to turn them into spies and send them back to Moscow to gather information for the Germans. Only this, he said, would save them from almost certain death in Dulag-127, where they would be returned if they refused. Lev was determined not to work for the Nazis but he was afraid of saying so in front of the other prisoners lest he be accused of anti-German propaganda and given a worse punishment. So Lev said to the captain in German, a language he had learned at school and university: ‘Ich kann diese Aufgabe nicht erfüllen [I cannot fulfil this task].’ When the German asked why, he said: ‘Das erkläre ich nachher [I will explain later].’
Taken by the captain to a separate room, Lev explained in Russian: ‘I am an officer of the Russian army and cannot act against it, against my own comrades.’ The captain said nothing. He sent Lev back to his holding cell. There Lev discovered that three other men had also refused to become spies. If Lev had spoken first, he might have been accused of encouraging their resistance.
The four refuseniks were put into the back of an open truck and driven down the highway towards Smolensk. A German guard sat with his back to the driver and played with his rifle all the way. The truck turned into the forest. Lev thought he was going to be shot. ‘The truck was going very fast down a narrow forest road,’ he recalled. ‘I assumed they must be taking us to an execution ground. I thought: how will I conduct myself in front of the firing squad? Will I have sufficient self-control? Wouldn’t it be better to kill myself? I could jump out of the truck, hopefully to smash into a tree, and if the soldier opened fire it would be even better.’ Lev prepared to jump. But then he noticed through the trees a shed with a neat stack of metal barrels: they were stopping for petrol; they were not going to be shot. As the captain had threatened, the four men were taken back to Dulag-127. There they tried to stick together to protect themselves against recriminations by the other Soviet prisoners, who must have known that they had returned from the spy school.
A few weeks later, in February 1942, Lev was sent with a group of other officers to a POW camp near the Prussian spa town of Fürstenberg-am-Oder, 80 kilometres north-east of Berlin. Because they had come from the disease-ridden Dulag-127, they were held in quarantine in a wooden barrack, where six men died from typhus in the first few days. Otherwise the officers were treated well and conditions in the camp were generally good. Lev was interrogated by the commandant and two other officers. They wanted to know why he spoke German so well, and whether he was Jewish, because they claimed his comrades said he was. They were persuaded that he wasn’t Jewish only when he recited the Lord’s Prayer.
In April Lev was sent with a smaller group of Soviet officers to a ‘training camp’ (Ausbildungslager) on the outskirts of Berlin. The ‘training’ meant that they were lectured on Nazi ideology and the new German order for Europe – ideas they were supposed to pass on to their fellow Soviet POWs in other concentration camps. For six weeks they were made to listen to the lectures of their teachers, mostly pre-war Russian émigrés, who read closely from a script. Then, in May, the officers were dispersed to various camps. Lev was put into a work brigade attached to the Kopp and Gaberland munitions factory in Oschatz.
Oschatz was the centre of a vast industrial zone of POW labour camps (Stammlager, or Stalag for short) between Leipzig and Dresden. Lev was put to work as a translator for a military inspection unit before being transferred in August to one of the work brigades attached to the HASAG (Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft) Factory in Leipzig. HASAG was a large complex of metal factories producing ammunition for the German army and air force. By the summer of 1942, it had several Stalags holding around 15,000 prisoners of various nationalities (Jews, Poles, Russians, Croats, Czechs, Hungarians, French) in two sectors, one named ‘Russian’ and the other ‘French’. Lev was housed in a boxroom on his own in the French sector and assigned as a translator to a Czech called Eduard Hladik, whose role was to sort out conflicts among the POWs. Although his mother was German, Hladik considered himself Czech. After the German annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, he had been conscripted by the Germans as a guard in the HASAG camps. Hladik felt sorry for the POWs and could not see the sense of treating them so badly when they were working for a German victory. As a prisoner, Lev had to walk in the gutter when he accompanied Hladik through the streets of Leipzig; if passers-by insulted Lev, Hladik would defend him by saying: ‘It’s easy to curse a man who cannot answer back.’
Hladik saw in Lev someone he could trust. There was something in Lev’s character that attracted people in positions of responsibility to him – his sincerity perhaps or maybe just the fact that he could speak with them in their language. The Czech befriended Lev and g
ave him German newspapers, forbidden to the POWs because they gave accurate reports on the military situation and – unlike the propaganda sheets they were given in the Stalags – described the Slavs as ‘sub-humans’. On the pretext that he was taking Lev for disinfection outside the barracks zone, Hladik even took Lev to visit one of his friends, a socialist called Eric Rödel, who spoke a little Russian and had a radio on which he listened to Soviet broadcasts. It was a highly risky adventure because Rödel lived above a former SA (Sturmabteilung) officer. Rödel and his family received Lev as an honoured guest. ‘The table was set with all sorts of luxuries,’ Lev recalled. ‘We talked for a long time … and then Eric turned the radio on, and I listened to the “Latest News” from Moscow with military bulletins from the Soviet Bureau of Information. The content of the programmes I can’t remember now but – funnily enough – one phrase has stuck in my mind: “In Georgia the tea harvest has been collected.” ’
Eventually, the Germans became suspicious of Hladik. One of the other guards denounced him, accusing him of anti-German activity, and Hladik was summoned for interrogation. He was sent to the Norwegian front. Not wanting to continue working as a translator, Lev applied to the camp authorities to be relieved of his duties on the grounds that his German was not good enough to rule out the possibility of inaccuracies: ‘I also said that I was incapable of doing propaganda work, because I lacked the skills of persuasion – I was just a scientist.’ In November, he was sent back to the work brigade at the Kopp and Gaberland factory in Oschatz.
Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag Page 3
