middle stood a small metal stove—a burzhuika—which was being conscientiously stoked with small bits of wood by Gavrila, an elderly north-Russian muzhik with a kindly rough-hewn face and a stubbly chin. He looked like a good-natured bear. Occasionally the
burzhuika smoked ferociously and the smoke mingled with the fumes of the exhaust pipe seeping into the bus through the half-broken back door. This strange-looking dismantled ambulance was typical, in a way, of the shortage of proper motor transport from which the Red Army was still suffering.
Gavrila had two sons in the army and had no news of one of them almost since the
beginning of the war. During the whole Stalingrad battle he had been a stretcher-bearer attached to this ambulance. "It was no fun for the wounded," he said, "to travel in this bone-rattler. But our men can stand a lot. It's true that before being sent off on their journey they always got a shot of morphine..."
It was about a hundred miles from Raigorod to Abganerovo on the Stalingrad-Caucasus
railway, and another sixty from there to Kotelnikovo.
Not very far west of Raigorod was a string of lakes in the Kalmuk steppes which had
been the first line of defences protecting the right flank of the Germans' Stalingrad salient. From a distance, through the heavily falling snow, one could see a patch of the black water of one of the salt lakes, and a little farther along we stopped to look at an enormous dump of wrecked German tanks and armoured cars. All this wreckage had
been collected over a fairly large area around the lakes—where the Russians had crashed through the lines held by the Rumanians. Thousands of Rumanians had surrendered here on November 20 and 21. There was no sign of them now except for a few tin hats, half-filled with snow. They had a large "C" in front and the Royal crown of Rumania; "C"
stood for Carol, even though Carol was no longer king.
As we drove through the steppes the snow was coming down so heavily that our
conducting officer, Colonel Tarantsev, wondered whether we'd make it. However, by the afternoon the weather cleared and the steppe was dazzling-white in the sun as we
approached the Stalingrad railway. At one point we crossed the Axai River; here also Rumanian helmets were lying about, half-buried in the snow, and a lot of wrecked
vehicles, but no German helmets. It had been further west that the Germans had crossed the Axai in their last push, and it was not until we reached Abganerovo and Zhutovo on the Stalingrad-Caucasus railway line that we first saw the traces of the Manstein
offensive of only a few days before. Abganerovo had been completely wrecked by
bombing during the German summer offensive, but there was a lot of rolling-stock on the railway. Zhutovo was some ten miles down the line, which ran parallel to the road. A number of goods trains steamed past; the Russians had already put the line back to the broad Russian gauge.
Zhutovo looked a pleasant enough village, with gardens and orchards and small Russian cottages. A crowd of youngsters gathered round us, and also two young women with
babies in their arms. The women told the usual story of how they had hidden in cellars during the last German occupation. "Thank God," one of them said, "our people came back soon, and the Germans hadn't even time to burn down our houses." There were two little boys there], aged about ten. One wore an enormous high sheepskin hat which came right down over his ears; the other wore a pair of army boots, about six sizes too large for him. "Where did you get all this?" I asked. "Got my hat off a dead Rumanian," Number One said proudly. "And these boots?" "Oh, that's off the dead Fritz, over there in the orchard. Would you like to see him? " I followed the two boys along a narrow path. Here, among the apple-trees, lay the dead German. His face was covered with snow, but his
feet, purple and glossy like those of a wax figure, were bare. He had no overcoat, only an ordinary tunic with an eagle and swastika. "Why don't they take him away?" I asked.
"The soldiers will take him away some time, I suppose," said the owner of the boots;
"they've got other Fritzes to collect round here. He's no bother in the cold weather."
Was the little fellow callous? I don't know... The Germans had brought war so deeply into his life, had made him live so intimately in the company of death, that one could hardly blame him. Corpses had become part of his daily routine, and to him there were only good corpses and bad corpses. A few days later I heard of a village on the Don
where the kids used a frozen German as a sleigh for sliding down a hill... I don't know if this story was true.
Kotelnikovo, which was to be our base for about a week, was a large town of some
25,000 people, and it had been occupied by the Germans and Rumanians between August
2 and December 29, when von Manstein's troops were driven out after their abortive
attempt to break through to Stalingrad, and I soon heard what it had been like under the German occupation. Kotelnikovo had been in the operational zone throughout the
occupation, and the German Army seemed to have been in full authority there; moreover, it was considered Cossack country, and the Germans refrained here from large-scale
savagery. Edgar Snow and I were billeted in a small wooden cottage belonging to an
elementary teacher, who was living there with her very decrepit old mother and her only child, a fifteen-year-old boy called Gai. Her husband was a railwayman, but had not been heard of since last June.
Kotelnikovo was not a story of great German atrocities. It was simply a story of German contempt and of Russian bitterness and humiliation, as told by the forty-year-old Russian school-teacher and her fifteen-year-old son. Just that—nothing more. But quite enough.
It was a sprawling town, with an administrative and shopping centre, and an important railway depot; the rest of the town consisted of many long streets of wooden cottages and gardens; all round was the flat steppe of the trans-Don country. Our house had two small rooms—the kitchen and the bedroom. Between the two was a large Russian stove, and it was very warm. Elena Nikolaevna was exuberant, plump, with fat arms and two golden
front teeth that glittered in the light of her one and only kerosene lamp. After presenting us to babushka, a tiny shrivelled creature who sat huddled in a corner of the kitchen, near the blacked-out window, she took the kerosene lamp and showed us into the bedroom,
leaving babushka in the dark. "Babushka will be all right," she said, "she is used to peeling potatoes in the dark." In the bedroom were two large beds, a table and a bookcase. "What a life we've had these last five months!" she exclaimed. "First we had some Rumanians here, and then the Germans—a tank crew of five men. Rough, hard people;
but then, I suppose, they looked upon us as enemies. Don't know what they would have been like in peace-time..."
A plane was zooming overhead. "That's a German plane; I know it by the sound. Makes me a bit nervous when they fly about at night. It's these transport planes that still try to take food to the Germans encircled at Stalingrad." Suddenly we heard a stick of bombs go off with a whine and somewhere, a long distance away, there was the sound of two not very loud explosions.
At the end of July the Secretary of the Raikom told Elena Nikolaevna that she and her family would be evacuated; but the Germans bombed the railway station to blazes, and occupied the town on August 2, before anything could be done. So all the teachers were left behind. One of them went to see the German commandant to ask when the schools
would open, but was told "not yet". So the teachers were left without any jobs. The population were summoned to a meeting to elect a starosta, or mayor, but the first two were invalidated by the Germans, and in the end they virtually appointed a railwayman called Paleyev to be starosta. He seemed a good man; but later he must have sold himself to the Germans. There were also some railwaymen who formed the local police; they
would bully the local people, make them carry bricks, and dig, and build fortifications for the Germans.
"But how
did you live?"
"One can hardly call it living. We were very short of food—nine ounces of flour a day per person, and nothing else. I used to do some work for the Rumanian officer when he lived here; but all he would give me for a whole day's washing was half a loaf. It was a shame. But then, I suppose, the Rumanians didn't have much. Some of the soldiers, far from giving us anything, asked for food; I'd give them a slice of bread, it was better that way; they would have taken it anyway. The Germans are a proud people, very different from the Rumanians. Occasionally they'd give me something—a tin of fish or a few
cigarettes. All the time they were here they gave me two tins of fish; it wasn't much, was it? I used to wash and scrub for them all day, and they'd send me out for water to the well. It was a slave's life. And Gai, my boy and babushka and I had to live in the little kitchen, all huddled together, and the five Germans lived here, in this room; some
sleeping on the bed, and the others on the floor. They had a lot of drink and food, and thought at first they were staying here indefinitely. In the morning they'd shout 'Matka, Wasser zum waschen!' They used to call everybody Matka, damned cheek! In the middle of December one of the man said: 'Russ nicht zurück, we've chased them fifty miles away'. It's quite true, the firing could no longer be heard. But on December 28 one of the men said: 'Russ kommt zurück'. You see, one wants to live, especially when you've got a young boy to look after, so I expressed no joy. Four of them went away without a word, only the fifth one said: 'Auf wiedersehen, Matka'. They were very gloomy. They weren't so bad, those five Germans, but they thought we were just their slaves. In other houses they behaved much worse, and the Rumanians were terrible—wouldn't leave the women
alone. There was a lot of rape in the town. I didn't hear of anybody being shot; but thirty, or maybe fifty people were taken away by the Germans. Or perhaps they followed them
voluntarily, people like the polizei. They were going to mobilise all the young people for work in Germany, and they sent out leaflets, but I don't think they had time to do
anything much..."
And then she described how, on the last night, the Germans set fire to all the public buildings in Kotelnikovo; but they hadn't time to burn down the whole town; there was much firing going on, and, in the middle of the night the streets were empty: the Germans had gone and the Russians had not yet come in.
So this was the room where the German tank crew had lived. The house was intact; partly no doubt because it was hardly worth looting. Here was a book-case with school-texts of physics and chemistry and Russian literature, and a lot of family photographs on the wall; and the Germans had left behind—how odd to find it here, in the wilds of the trans-Don steppes!—a map and index of the Paris Metro, and a copy of the Wittgensteiner Zeitung of December 4 with an editorial: "50. Geburtstag Francos: der Erretter Spaniens".
The next morning we met Gai, Elena Nikolaevna's fifteen-year-old son. He was fairly
tall, but extraordinarily thin. He had a bright, intelligent, slightly monkey-like face, and spoke beautiful Russian in a clear, silvery voice. "Is that what the Germans have reduced you to?" I said. "No, I was always rather thin; but it was, of course, upsetting to live under the Germans; they got on one's nerves; and also, we didn't have enough food. But when I went with mother last year to Stalingrad to see a well-known specialist, he said I was quite all-right, just a little anaemic... I am sorry I wasn't here last night, but when the Germans were here I never went out at night, and very seldom even during the day—one just didn't feel like it. Now I go out to see my comrades—the ones I used to go to school with." "Yes, it's a blessing," said Elena Nikolaevna, "Gai will now be able to go to school again. He is the cleverest boy in his form—full marks in every subject. He has read all the classics, but his chief interest is science, and he wants to go into the Navy... "
I was to have many other talks with Gai after that. He would talk about anything—about himself, and his future career, and the Germans, and the films he had seen. "I like American films," he said. "Here in Kotelnikovo Song of Love and The Great Waltz and Chaplin's City Lights were a great success. Before the war we had a very good time, you know. I was a Pioneer myself, and would be in the Komsomol by now, but for the
German occupation. All our young people were preparing to be engineers, or doctors, or scientists. I want to enter the Naval Academy. If the Germans had stayed, the girls would have been expected to wash floors and the boys to look after the cattle. They didn't regard us as human beings at all... That's just how it was under the Germans." "Did they kick you about?" "No, they simply took no notice of me. Sometimes they'd ask: 'What form are you in?' or 'Where's your father?' I'd say he was in the Red Army. They would look cross, but say nothing." "Did they ever say what sort of government they were going to set up here?" "Yes, they would say: 'Everybody will work for himself; no more kolkhozes and no more communism. We aren't going to stay here; we have only come to liberate
you from the Jews and the Bolsheviks'. They put up pictures of Hitler on the walls; they were called 'Hitler the Liberator'. He hardly looked human. Completely beastly face. Like a savage from the Malayan jungle. Terrifying. They opened the church; first they had a Rumanian priest, later a Russian. I once went when the Rumanian was still there. Inside were crowds of Rumanian soldiers. At one point they'd all go down plunk on their knees.
Then they would carry round a dish, and the Rumanians would put money on it—roubles, or marks or lei. .. It didn't make much difference. All money was pretty useless. The mark was worth ten roubles, but the marks they had here were occupation marks, without a
water-mark, and were as good as useless... The Germans had a passion for destroying
things. They tore up all the vegetables in our allotment. And they burned down the public library the last night they were here, and they wouldn't even leave my little library alone,"
said Gai, pointing at the bookcase. "They tore up the Russian magazines, and tore out of the books all the Stalin and Lenin pictures. So silly, don't you think? It was those tank men. Queer chaps. You should have seen them at Christmas. They went all sloppy. They had got a lot of parcels from Germany. They lit a tiny paper Christmas tree, and
unwrapped enormous cakes, and opened tins, and winebottles, and got drunk, and sang
sentimental songs about something or other." "Where were you at that time?" "Just where we always were, next door in the kitchen." "Did they not offer you any wine or cake?"
"Of course not; wouldn't even occur to them. They didn't look upon us as people."
"Weren't you hungry?" "Of course I was, but I would have hated to take part in their festivities." He produced a lighter from his pocket. "They left it here by mistake. I found it under one of the beds. We have no matches, so it's a useful gadget to have. But I don't like having anything from those people... Yes, I lost a lot of weight. The bombs got on my nerves, I suppose, and also the feeling that I was no longer a human being. They
never stopped rubbing that in. They had no respect for anybody—they'd just undress in front of women; we were just a lot of slaves. And there was also no food; no kolkhoz market, and it's very bad for your system if you get no fats," he concluded with a scientific air.
Elena Nikolaevna would talk a lot about herself and about babushka, her mother. She was the last survivor of a Cossack family, ruined during the Civil War. Her father had been a small farmer in a Cossack stanitsa on the Don; but he hadn't much of a business head, and the farm had gone to pot during the Civil War, so he sold his farm to a kulak for ten sacks of flour. They moved to Novocherkassk, but in the typhus epidemic both her father and her brother died. "I was only eighteen then, and I entered the Komsomol, and got a small scholarship for the Novocherkassk music school, where I was taught singing"; but she couldn't make much of a living with that, and it was not enough to support her mother as well, so when her future husband, a railwayman, asked her to marry him, she agreed.
"He's a good man, my husband, though he hadn'
t much education. But he is in the right Bolshevik traditions; his father also had been a railwayman for forty years, and had received an inscribed gold watch from Kaganovich himself." Later, after settling down in Kotelnikovo in her husband's little house, she took a correspondence course in
elementary teaching. It was during the days when thousands of schools were opening
throughout the Soviet Union, and Elena Nikolaevna was as good as anybody for this
simple job. This coquette of thirty-eight or so no doubt dreamed of all she might have been but for the Civil War. "I used to look pretty good and kulturno" she said, "when I was younger, with my hair waved and with a nice summer frock." And she described how she had her two perfectly good front teeth crowned in gold, because it was "fashionable"
at the time.
And babushka sat in the corner, and would say how awful it was with those Germans in the house, and "I would cry and cry, thinking I would soon die, and how awful it was to leave my dear ones in all this misery... But now that our own dear people are back I think I'll live to a hundred," she said as her little face screwed up into a toothless smile... And she'd go on, talking almost to herself: "I used to know English and American gentlemen.
My husband used to be an izvoshchik, had a fine phaeton on springs; he used to drive English and American gentlemen across the Don; they were engineers. That was a long
time ago, still under the Tsar..."
And Elena Nikolaevna's husband, the railwayman? They had last heard of him in June
1942. He was at Voronezh then. Now that the postal service had been restored at
Kotelnikovo, they might hear from him soon. They might—or they might not...
"You can say what you like," Elena Nikolaevna said one day (not that anybody had said anything), "but our Soviet régime is a good régime. Even babushka, to whom it was all very strange at first, has now become very fond of it. And look at this little house of ours.
Russia at war Page 60
