Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  ground lost on the Right Bank; then there was a second order, from one of the generals of the 8th Army, which said 'destroy'; and since then, there has been a third one, again saying 'Don't'. I don't know who is responsible for this one. So they may still have a few illusions left; but they can't last long now! In the towns, however, they have always tried to destroy at least the main buildings; you'll have seen something of that here in Uman; they were in a devil of a hurry here, so most of the damage is limited to the big buildings on the outskirts, especially near the airfield. And, of course, there's also the power-station which nearly everywhere is among the first things to go... "

  By far the most colourful of the Mayor's guests that night was the priest, the Archierei, i.e. the Bishop of Taganrog, a bishop of the "black" or monastic clergy. He was a handsome man, with a whimsical look in his eyes, rosy cheeks and a blond, silky beard.

  He was certainly a bit of a rogue.

  He drank vodka like a Hero of the Soviet Union on leave, but carried it remarkably well, except that his humour grew more whimsical and crazy as the evening went on. Heaven

  knows what he really thought at the back of his mind as he sat there, the guest of honour at the Bolshevik Mayor's supper table. He must have chuckled to himself at the thought of it; in fact, his whole conversation was like one unceasing chuckle. "Ah," he said, "the morning the Red Army walked into Uman, and some of the dear boys came into my

  house, and embraced me and asked me for a drink, I brought out a bottle of vodka, and, believe it or not, I drank to Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin! Drank to him for the first time in my wicked life! That's what the Germans did to me!" he chuckled gaily. "They made me face death three times; I spent sixty-six days in jail because I wouldn't knuckle under them; not I! But they're terrible people, and if you don't wish to perish, you have to keep your wits about you. Now look at this," he said, pointing at his enormous diamond cross,

  "do you think they would have let me keep this if they had seen it? Not they—not the thieves and robbers that they are. Why, it's worth, I am told, well over a hundred

  thousand roubles. I received it five years ago from the Patriarch Sergei himself. I hid it in a nice cosy safe place as soon as the Germans came; I wasn't going to take any chances with this precious cross Sergei had given me as a token of his esteem."

  "I had a lot of trouble with the Germans, I can tell you," he said, "I really suffered for my country. How I adore the Red Army!" he cried, and, bending over the shoulder of the major sitting beside him, he kissed the epaulette with a loud voluptuous smack. "You don't mind, Comrade Major, do you? Let me kiss it again!" (Gosh, I thought to myself, the old buffoon, Father Karamazov come to life again!) I also thought for a moment the Major would resent this piece of buffoonery, but he took it like a man, and merely

  laughed. "Oh, I know", the High Priest went on, "the Germans pretended they were great Christians; they opened five churches in this town of Uman—but what for? For German

  propaganda, for un-Christian, heathen propaganda. And when they saw that it had no

  effect, they turned against the church. The men of the Kommandatur would break into the church during Divine Service, and they carried rubber truncheons. They were afraid of our Russian nationalism. What quarrels, what arguments we had with them! They

  expected us to recognise the Metropolitan Serafim of Berlin—a Nazi, I tell you. But they said he was the real head of the Russian Church and declared that that holy man the

  Patriarch Sergei was—I hardly can repeat it—an impostor, who had been appointed by

  Stalin. 'No', I said, 'he has not been appointed by Stalin, but by the Metropolitans. ..' 'Oh', they said, 'they're just a small group of impostors, a bunch of Kremlin stooges... ' I said,

  'No, the Patriarch of Moscow is the only Head I can recognise'. But these arguments

  really started later. At first, I must say that, to my eternal shame, I thought I could take advantage of the Germans' arrival, and open a few churches at Taganrog—for at that time I was still at Taganrog. They sounded encouraging at first—no use denying it. Only, my troubles soon started. I was told that I was expected to make a speech to the faithful, denouncing the Moscow Patriarch and accepting the authority of their Berlin

  Metropolitan. They even said I should say prayers for a German victory. I failed to do either, and was, of course, duly reported, and ordered to go to Rostov, where I was hauled over the coals by a big German chief, who said: 'Look here, Your Eminence, if you think the German Army needs your prayers, you are quite wrong. But don't make any mistake

  about it; we give good marks to those who do pray for us, and bad marks to those who do not. And, he added, 'the bad marks can be very bad indeed'. What a nasty, horrid man he was! "

  For a long time there was no serious trouble, but then, suddenly, he was ordered to leave Taganrog for Kakhovka, in the Ukraine, where the Germans again brought pressure to

  bear on him, this time in real earnest. They wanted him as "an Ukrainian Bishop" to make a public denunciation of the Patriarch Sergei, and to write a long article which the papers throughout the Ukraine would publish. Again he chuckled into his blond silky beard. "I wrote them an article—it made their hair stand on end! So they simply locked me up—

  they locked me up in a dark cell without a window; and they starved me, and often left me for a whole day without water. I stayed in that cell for sixty-six days and nights... And as I sat there in the dark, hungry and thirsty, I kept saying to myself: 'I am doing the right thing. How can I not recognise the Patriarch who gave me my diamond cross? How can I not recognise Stalin? He gave me my passport.' And I said to myself: 'No, I shall not work for the enemies of my people, even if it costs me my life'."

  It was not quite clear how and why he was let out in the end; but it seems that he was deprived of his large church, and given only a small church at Uman. He had one more argument with the Germans, though, and quite recently. "One day the Gebietskommissar called for me, and said: 'Now what do you make of this? The Archbishop of York has

  visited Moscow.' (The German papers were, indeed, full of it.) 'What do you make of the Anglo-Saxons and the Bolsheviks conquering Europe? ' I said I did not make anything of it. I tried to sound as simple as I could, and I said: 'Whatever happens, it will be the will of God'. The Gebietskommissar got very angry and said: 'I am not asking for any emotional utterances from you... I want you to think in a rational spirit.' I said he could not expect me to be too rational; I was a Priest, and therefore whatever God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, decided, was good enough for me.' And I quoted to him the Lord's Prayer—'Thy will be done.' He didn't like it, and told me to go to hell." And, with a chuckle, he added: "Fancy telling a Bishop to go to Hell!"

  I asked what he was going to do now. "Now", he cried, "now I shall be happy... Happy and frightened..." "Why frightened?" "Ooh! I am frightened, frightened of the Patriarch", he squealed, becoming more and more Dostoyevskian in his buffoonery. "Ooh! He is such a great man. Such a powerful mind. Do you know that his skull is sixty-three

  centimetres in circumference? A great brain. After all", he explained in a dramatic whisper, "I did work with the Germans; oh, only a teeny-weeny bit, but I worked with them all the same... It's true, I refused to pray for a Hitler victory; nor did I write the article that they demanded from me denouncing the Moscow Patriarch... But still I am frightened. Sergei—he is such a disciplinarian! But I am not frightened of Joseph Vissarionovich, who knows I am loyal. He, in Ms infinite wisdom knows that I am not

  like the Bishop of Vinnitsa. He escaped to Germany by plane; they even took some cattle away by plane. They took sheep and bishops away by air!" He giggled, and repeated

  "Sheep and Bishops!" And, turning to the Mayor, he said: "I know you'll agree with me that Joseph Vissarionovich will not be angry with me... But Sergei, oh I am frightened of that great, grand old man! But perhaps his great heart will soften when he learns that I had to live in hiding the last t
hree weeks the Germans were here. And I also want to write a little book which will be a devastating answer to the foul and libellous book that was written by a Volksdeutscher called Albrecht, about our Orthodox Church, and I want to print on the cover a large black serpent with a swastika on its tail... But I shall atone for my sins. I shall serve my country, great Mother Russia, and her great Soviet Government, and pray for them as long as I live... And so, for the second time in my sinful life, let me drink with you all to our great leader Stalin! "

  We drank to Stalin. Our host and the others listened to all this with tolerant amusement.

  The Archierei was a typical case, an average case. He was no hero, but he had not

  "collaborated" wholeheartedly; that, at least, was fairly clear. Everybody understood that, in the past, he could have had but little love for the Soviet regime, and one had to make allowances for this. He had, for a short time, taken advantage of the Germans' apparent desire to encourage the revival of the Orthodox Church, but had soon realised that they were only out for their own ends.

  The roads continued to be rivers of mud, but one morning the Major wangled a

  Studebaker in which we drove to the Bug, west of Uman. Though the Red Army was well

  beyond the Bug, on its way to Rumania, there were many people on the road: soldiers

  who were wading through the mud towards the Bug, and they were jovial and in high

  spirits; and new labour battalions of peasants who were being sent to repair the railway, and who were not looking too pleased to be dragged away from their farms; and, lastly, new army recruits, who were going to Uman to report for service in the Red Army—now

  that, with the liberation of this part of the Ukraine, they had become available. Some of these looked singularly unenthusiastic; "however," said the Major, "they'll soon get used to the idea when they see so many of their fellow-Ukrainians, with high decorations, in the Red Army." There was no doubt, he said, that the German occupation had

  demoralised many people in this part of the country, and while they hated the Germans, they had also lost much of their "soviet-consciousness" and had become parochial in their outlook.

  We stopped in one or two villages; they had not suffered much from the war; nor had

  more than two Germans ever been stationed there; nevertheless the German officials

  regularly came on a weekly inspection, and slackness and absenteeism were severely

  dealt with; a German surveyor with a whip travelled around the fields in a brichka and threw his weight about. In case of any trouble the police were called for. Suspected slackers were beaten up. Proportionately, there were much fewer deportations to

  Germany from these villages than from the towns; the food deliveries were rigorously exacted, and the peasants said that in fact the whole output of the kolkhoz was taken by the Germans, and they themselves had to live on whatever their "individual" plots yielded; however, in summer, most of the perishable fruit and vegetables were left to them, too, as the Germans did not have enough transport to take them away. The

  Germans had made vague promises of splitting up the land among the peasants after the war, but there were few illusions on that score.

  This part of the Ukraine had been treated as an important source of food for Germany.

  Even so, the area under cultivation was only eighty percent of pre-war; but even this was better than the country round Kharkov, where I had been in the previous summer, and

  where only forty percent of the land had been cultivated. About two months before the Germans left, they started taking much of the livestock to Germany. This, of course, created much anti-German feeling. Even so, and even despite the deportations, many

  peasants were aloof and seemed indifferent to what was happening; it was clear that the Soviets—or "the Reds", as the peasants here called them—would have a job to develop a proper "soviet-consciousness" among these people. As Kampov said: "They lived reasonably well under the occupation; for the sly Ukrainian peasant is the greatest

  virtuoso in the world at hiding food. He always hid it from us; you can imagine how

  much better still he hid it from the Germans! And now that the Germans have

  disappointed them, they hope that maybe we shall scrap the kolkhozes. But we won't... "

  Ukrainian Deportees

  Nearly four million Ostarbeiter from the Soviet Union—most of them from the Ukraine

  —were deported as slave labour to Germany; and, in the Ukraine, this was No. 1

  grievance against the Germans. Not only the deportations themselves but, even more so perhaps, the way in which they were carried out.

  In Uman, I had long talks with two local girls, Valya and Galina, who had managed to return from deportation. Valya, a dark little girl of twenty, must have been pretty only two years before, but now was broken, and looked like a frightened little animal. To get away from Germany she had put her hand under a flax-cutting machine and had all four fingers cut off.

  "On February 12, 1942, at two in the morning, the Ukrainian police came, followed by some German gendarmes in green uniform, and I was taken away under escort to School

  No. 4. From there, together with a lot of other girls, we were taken at 5 a.m. to the railway station, and packed into goods wagons—seventy of us...

  "After a very long journey we got to some town, where we were put in a camp, all the women were made to strip and were sent to be deloused. Then, before reaching Munich, we were taken to a village called Logow. There we lived in a camp, until a manufacturer arrived, and he took us all to a flax-combing factory. We lived there in a barracks

  attached to the factory—it was really a sort of camp too. A little farther away, lived some French and Belgian war prisoners; and in another part of the camp were some Polish and Jewish girls. I stayed in this place seven and a half months. We got up at five in the morning, and, without food, we went on working till two in the afternoon. Then we

  would get two spoonfuls of boiled turnip and a slice of bread, which included sawdust and other substitutes. After that another shift came on, and it worked until eleven or twelve o'clock. For an evening meal we received three or four small baked potatoes and a cup of ersatz coffee; that was all the food we ever got.

  "The Germans in the factory were very brutal. I was once beaten by a German woman. It was when I told her that the machine was out of order. She slapped my face and punched me, as if it was my fault. Another time when the machine went wrong, the foreman also hit me, saying I was a 'verdammte Bolshevik'. He hit and hit me again, and I cried.

  "There was so much flax-dust in the place, they had to keep the electric light on all day. It was a terribly depressing place. We received no money at all. I was so sick of all this, of the dust, and the bad food, and the beatings, and my clothes that were all going to pieces, because they would not give us any work clothes, and all the insults, and all the

  'verdammte Bolshevik' and that cold, contemptuous air with which the Germans talked to us and looked at us, as though we weren't real people, that my nerves began to go to pieces. There was some wild garlic growing outside, and we used to pick it, and rub our gums with it, because we were all developing scurvy, and our teeth were beginning to fall out; but the Director once arrived and said it was verboten to chew garlic because he could not stand the stink. At the railway station one day—we were made to unload coal once a week—there was another row over the garlic; one of the foremen, seeing me

  chewing garlic, kicked me in the shins, and hit me over the face; but the other girls began to scream at him; so he stopped. I was so sick at heart, I wanted to throw myself under the train that day; but I remembered my parents, and I felt sorry for them. I sometimes thought I might get one of the Belgians or Frenchmen to make me pregnant, because

  sometimes they sent pregnant girls home. But the very thought of it revolted me; was I an animal to have a child from a stranger? I was a virgin, and what would my parents say if I came home to them
in that condition?

  "I did not throw myself under a train; and yet, as the days went on, I grew more and more desperate. I knew that if I did not do something, I should die a slow death. And then, one morning, without premeditation, I did it. It just occurred to me in a flash. I was working on a machine, with a great knife going up and down and cutting the flax threads. And, almost without thinking, I suddenly put my hand under the knife. I did not lose

  consciousness; I was still quite tough then; I only shut my eyes, and then, when it

  happened, I was frightened to look. Then I called for the German woman working next to me; and she screamed and ran for the foreman; he was a fat fair-haired man, about thirty-eight and very deaf, and she took some time to explain what had happened. He came

  rushing along, and I was taken off to the infirmary, where they made me a tourniquet and bandaged me up. The foreman was very worried; some kind of commission was expected

  that day to come and inspect the place, and he thought he might get into trouble. Some Frenchmen and Belgians then led me to our barracks; I was nearly unconscious by the

  time we got there. The Director had still not been informed. The foreman went to him to report; and the Director ordered that an ambulance be sent for which would take me to the hospital in Munich, about ten miles away. It was almost a pleasure to be in the

  hospital. My hand hurt me; but I was put in a clean bed, with white bed-linen. They did not give me much food, but what I got was nice and tasty. I stayed there about a month; then the Director asked that I be sent back to the factory. He urged me to stay on; said that he would appoint me one of the managers of the camp; I don't know exactly what he was up to, I think he wanted to avoid paying my fare to the Ukraine. For four months he kept me there.

  Finally, I was sent home by the Munich Arbeitsamt (Labour Office). It was by pure accident that this happened. One day when I was going to Munich for a dressing, I talked to a German woman who advised me to go to the Arbeitsamt. She was a kind woman, and even paid my fare, and told me exactly where to go. There, at the Arbeitsamt, they gave me a paper, and the police took me off to the station the next day and put me in a goods carriage along with several other Ukrainians. At the factory, the night before I left, the Director seemed much annoyed, but said nothing. I was given a pailful of boiled turnips, and a loaf of bread, and the people in the camp gave me their day's ration, and a few odds and ends they had saved up. But during many days, on that long journey, I had nothing to eat.