Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  Now that I think of it, I realise that for two months they had not paid me anything; and later they paid me seventy pfennigs a week. And when we said to the foreman who was

  paying out the money: 'Why so little?' he would shout ' Ruhig'. ('Be quiet!')... God, how they tormented us", Valya said, almost with a shudder. "It was so bitterly insulting, the way these people behaved to us. They looked at us with such contempt. Why? I ask you, Why? Was that the kind of life I was preparing for? I was growng up happily, in our

  Ukraine. Why should my life have been broken like this?" And then, as an afterthought:

  "There was another girl in the factory, and she decided to follow my example. But the Germans guessed this time that it had been done deliberately; and she was not allowed to go home. So she lost her hand for nothing."

  Galina Ivanovna's experience was very similar to Valya's—yet she was, temperamentally, an entirely different woman, and, in a way, more typically Ukrainian with her sarcastic humour, and her singular contempt for the Germans "who did not know what good food was until they got to the Ukraine."

  She was small and perky and fair, with the perfect comedian's face, with lively blue eyes and a little turned-up nose. She laughed a great deal, but it was not a kindly laugh; she was a mimic and satirist. She wore a pale-blue dress and a cocky little hat with a feather.

  She was about thirty, and physically slightly faded, which was not surprising after all she had gone through. She had been an actress before the war in the First Kolkhoz Theatre in Kiev, where she played small parts in Ukrainian peasant comedies. She quoted a few bits from her parts, but never got very far with them... "Oh dear, I've just forgotten everything", she said, "It seems such ages ago since I was an actress in Kiev... An actress", she repeated with a bitter little laugh. "Being a putzfrau (charwoman) is now more in my line of business. My husband used to be one of the stage managers at the

  theatre. Now he's somewhere in the Red Army. I haven't heard from him for years... He's from Uman."

  Galina Ivanovna had been in Germany, and her story is the story of millions of Europeans

  —with variations. "The real trouble", she began, "started here in Uman when a German called Graf Spretti arrived here in February '42 to recruit labour.

  [He is mentioned in the Nuremberg Trial as one of Sauckel's recruiting officers.]

  The Germans announced a big meeting at the Cinema. A lot of us went there, just to see what it was all about. So Spretti said: 'I want you people of Uman to go voluntarily to Germany to help the German army.' And he promised us the moon. But we had a fair idea of how much such promises were worth, so we said: 'But what if we don't want to go? '

  Then Graf Spretti gave us a dirty look and said: Tn that case you will be politely

  requested to go all the same.' That was on February 10 and two days later they started rounding up people in a house-to-house search—the police, armed with rifles, would go from one house to the other and collect the younger people. We were taken to a big

  school, and at five o'clock in the morning we were taken to the railway station; we were put in railway carriages, and these were locked up. Some of the people had some food with them, and it was shared. We were told that we'd be fed at Lwow, but when we got there, we were given nothing at all, not even water.

  "We stopped there at the railway station for a whole night, and then we went on to Przemysl. At Przemysl the Germans unlocked the carriages, and started examining our

  luggage."

  "What kind of carriages were they?" I asked.

  "What kind?" she said, almost surprised at my question. "Just ordinary goods carriages; we all sat or lay on the floor; there were no benches. There were about sixty or seventy people to a carriage. Anyway, as I was saying, they came to examine our luggage at

  Przemysl. 'What do you want all this luggage for?' the Germans said. 'There's any amount of stuff you can buy in Germany—fancy taking all these filthy clothes to Germany.' So they took away nearly all the clothes we had, and all the heavier luggage, and left us with just small bundles... "

  The whole journey, which lasted a month, was a nightmare. In a camp near Przemysl,

  where they were kept for a fortnight, they were given hardly any food. Several of the girls fell ill, and a few died. Then, in Western Germany, they were taken to another camp; here at least there were some Britis;h and French prisoners who would throw them some food over the fence.

  "The friendliness of the English and French", Galina said, "cheered us up a little bit. They would throw us bits of chocolate and some kind of wafers—very nice they were, with

  sweet little seeds inside them. We always thought the English, French and Russians were all very different people, but it turned out that we are all much the same. Only the Germans are different.

  "And then, women and factory managers, and all sorts of people arrived one day at the camp. We were lined up in the snow—four rows of us—and these people kept walking

  up and down and inspecting us. So two hundred of us were picked by one of the factory managers, and we were taken by train to a barracks, with barred windows—the place was inside the factory grounds in a small town near Ulm. We were received there by a bunch of gendarmes, who said: 'Aha, Kommunisten' '. This place was much worse than the other camp. Before going to work we stayed in the barracks for three days, with only raw

  turnips and raw potatoes to eat, and one only nibbled at it, it was no use trying to eat a lot of the stuff... But at least there were bunks of sort to sleep on—hard and filthy, but still bunks...

  "Later, they began to heat the stove, so we were at least able to cook what little food there was. On the fourth day we were taken to work. It used to be a hat factory; now they made helmet linings, or rather the sort of caps worn under the helmet. They made them of

  rabbit skins. We were given no gloves and our shoes also were falling to pieces. Our hands got into a terrible condition with handling those rabbit skins and treating them in some kind of acid." Galina Ivanovna showed her hands; they were small and well-shaped, but they looked scarred and the flesh round the nails seemed to have been eaten away.

  "Yes," she went on, "I lived in that factory barracks for eight months and twenty days; and to give you an idea of the condition in which we girls were, I'll say something which may seem indelicate—but I hope you'll understand. 180 girls were working there, and

  most of them didn't have what girls have every month; the barracks were thirty yards away from the factory, and we never got outside the factory grounds, except on our 'day off'. We were under constant guard.

  "We worked ten or twelve hours a day, and on our 'day off' we were always taken to the goods station to unload railway trucks. We were made to wear an 'Ost' badge—a blue

  badge with white lettering—but were never allowed to go into town. They actually

  charged us fifty pfennigs for the badge. For seven days' work we received one mark

  twenty pfennigs, and for fifty pfennigs we bought Sprudel—soda water—there was

  nothing else we could buy. I remembered now how Graf Spretti had told us that we'd

  wear silk stockings, and have 100 marks a week. At first when we arrived, we were

  promised new clothes and blankets; all we got was one blanket each, and once a fortnight they'd give us a tiny bit of soap with which to wash ourselves and wash our clothes. In our part of the barracks there were 180 girls, but in the other parts of the building there were 200 more women, all Ukrainians, or from Kursk, and 200 lads, from fifteen to

  twenty-three. What they gave us to eat was blue cabbage, turnips and sometimes some

  spinach, and 100 grammes per day of margarine to cook the stuff in—100 grammes for

  100 people, that is, one gramme per day. Really nourishing, what! In other buildings there were Czechs and Poles and Greeks, and Belgians, and Frenchmen. We weren't

  allowed to speak to them— but we did all the same.

  "The Poles and the Fren
ch were better off than we were. They received twenty-five to thirty-five marks a week. The Poles had to wear a badge with a yellow 'P', the Belgians and the French were not expected to wear any badge. No difference was made between

  Ukrainians and Russians—both were treated the same. The Belgians and the Czechs, the Frenchmen and the Italians were all very decent to us, and gave us things. The Poles were more aloof. The Italians spoke longingly of macaroni.

  "We used to meet the other girls in the lavatory, and there we'd talk—talk in bad German.

  One day one of the Italian girls said to me: 'You are even unluckier than we are. They say you are being treated like this because you are Communists. But, believe me, we are far more Communist than you are. Come on, let's sing the International. And there, in the ladies' lavatory, the two of us softly sang the International, each to her own words.

  "We once even threatened a hunger strike when the food had become altogether

  impossible, and we were developing scurvy so that our hands and arms swelled and our eyebrows started falling out, and the hair on our heads got all brittle...

  "During air raids we were all driven into a big basement covered over with cement, and the door was locked from outside. The Germans went to their own shelter. When the airraid warning started, the chefs, as they were called, came rushing in, brandishing whips, and drove us into the cellar. I lived through seven or eight big raids. One big bomb fell near the cathedral of Ulm, and wrecked the Rathaus, and demolished a small factory

  where they made some kind of metal tubing; 120 of our Ukrainians who were working

  there, were killed..."

  "But what were the Germans like with whom you had to work?" I asked.

  Galina Ivanovna merely screwed up her face. "There was one fat German in our factory.

  He once came into our barracks, and said: 'Ah, Ukrainian girls,' and said he liked

  Ukrainian songs, and would we sing to him. So we said: 'Alright, only we don't get much to eat, and will you give us something if we sing.' So he said yes. So we sang, in the dark miserable barracks, and as we sang the tears trickled down our faces. When we had

  finished, he said: 'That was very nice.' And he pulled out a five mark note and asked for three marks change." Galina laughed angrily. "As if he didn't know we had nothing. Still, he insisted, so we scraped together what pfennigs we had, and it came to two marks

  thirty. He seemed annoyed it wasn't more, but took the change and went away. "And then," she went on, "there was a foreman who worked in our workshop. He had a tiny bit of ground near our barracks, where he grew vegetables. He was a fat man with a shaved head and a concertina neck. What a fuss he made of his plot! He managed to grow a

  sunflower, and in case the sparrows picked at it, he put a pair of old pants over it; honest to God, he did. So I said to him one day: 'In our country we grow sunflowers by the mile, how many pairs of old pants do you think we'd need if we used your agricultural

  methods? There wouldn't be enough pants in the whole of Germany... ' He looked kind of sheepish."

  "Bah", said Galina, "these Germans—they're really unlike all other people. Now the French—they're quite different. We used to see them on Sundays at the goods station. We used to talk to them. And some of our girls went further than talking. The point is that if a Ukrainian girl gets pregnant, she is sent home. There was a dark shed behind one of the large piles of coal, and there some of our girls would go in the evening and make love with the French. God knows, they were so hungry and worn-out, they didn't really want to make love, but they hoped they might get pregnant. And the French were friendly—

  real comrades. There was one Frenchman I knew, who managed to escape from the

  factory. The night before he escaped, he said to me: 'There's a little corner near the stove in the workshop, and I'll leave you a note—try to pick it up tomorrow morning.' I went and looked for the note, and I found it, and with it were three bars of chocolate. The note said: 'This is all I've got. Good luck to you. I have run away. I hope they don't catch me.'

  They didn't catch him, though they sent the police all over the place. None of us said we knew anything. There was this strange solidarity among all of us non-Germans; a real fellow-feeling, a common hatred of the Fritz... And that feeling that we were not alone kept us going for a time, in spite of everything... But my health was becoming so bad that I felt that if I stayed on much longer, I should fall ill and die. And I did not want to die.

  There was an Austrian there called Hans, who worked in our workshop. He showed me a

  pamphlet about Thael-mann and said: 'Although Thaelmann is a German, he is a good

  man.' I said I doubted whether any German could be a good man. He gave me a queer

  look and for a moment I wondered if he wasn't a provocateur. Then I said: 'Oh God, what do I care, anyway? I want to go away, back home, and if I don't, I'll just vergift myself, poison myself...' Then Hans said: 'You won't betray me, will you? Here are six

  cigarettes'—and he slipped them into my hand—'Boil them, and let the infusion wait for an hour, and then drink it. It will give you a bad heart, and they may send you home. But don't give me away.' I did as he told me, but I was in such poor health that my stomach couldn't take it, and I was sick. I told him what had happened and he gave me six more cigarettes, telling me to try again. This time it was successful. It gave me terrible palpitations, and I was in a state of complete physical collapse. There were moments when I thought I'd die. I was taken to hospital. They x-rayed me three times, and decided my heart was so bad I would either soon die or be a cripple for life, so they gave me a certificate allowing me to go back to the Ukraine. But before that happened, I stayed in hospital for two months and five days. They patched up my hands, which were in a

  terrible state, and I had many visitors—there was a Greek girl who came to see me, and two Serbian girls; these were among the best. Altogether the Serbians and the Czechs were the best people of all; the French also were good, for instance Henri, who escaped and left me those three bars of chocolate; he was a real Communist. On the whole, all the foreigners in Germany were terribly decent people, and we had with them a common

  language as we never had with any Germans... Well, that's not perhaps quite true; there were two decent Germans I knew during all those months. One was a girl called Frieda.

  She knew much more about what was happening in the world than I did. I knew nothing

  —except from her. It was she who would tell me about the war in Russia—where the Red Army was. She got very excited at the time the Germans were stopped at Stalingrad. My feeling was that she was a double agent. She pretended to work for the Nazis, but she was also an agent of the Popular Front. She often talked to me, and warned me, and told me to warn the other girls that any Ukrainian girl who was intimate with a Frenchman or any other foreigner was liable to be shot. Frieda was a damn good girl. There was also

  another girl called Amalia—I didn't know her so well. But I later learned that both Frieda and Amalia had been shot by the Gestapo. But, in general the Germans are a wicked and crazy people."

  Finally Galina returned to Uman, after another harrowing two months' journey. She was a physical wreck by then, and spent three months in bed at the house of some people who had befriended her. After that she took a job as a putzfrau—a cleaner—at a hotel occupied by German officers. But her troubles were not yet over.

  She was now faced with a complicated family situation—strangely reminiscent of the

  turbulent years of the civil war in the Ukraine, when so many families were divided

  against themselves. Her brother Kiril had been a machine-gunner in the Red Army; he

  was taken prisoner by the Germans but escaped, and later turned up as a civilian in his native village where he set up shop again as a watchmaker. He had a wife who, before the war, was an active member of the Komsomol. "Three months ago she was arrested and taken away, and rumour had it she was shot", Galina sai
d. "The strange thing was that the starosta had denounced her to the Germans, and when they came, they knew exactly where to find her; for she had been hiding in a cellar for the last month. And from what I have heard from my brother Kiril and also from my mother, there's little doubt that the starosta had learned from my other brother, Fedor, where Kiril's wife was in hiding. For Fedor, though my brother, is a thoroughly bad lot. He was a member of the Ukrainian

  polizai, and he must have told the starosta. This bad brother is probably still in hiding in our village; and, if it hasn't been done already, I shall denounce him myself to the Red Commandant... "

  (6) The Wail of the German stomach

  The German prisoners I saw near Uman were a very mixed bunch. All of them were

  bitterly disappointed at having been caught, when most of the Germans had got away

  beyond the Bug. The Austrians were already claiming to be "quite different from the Germans", though one I saw had obviously been brought up in the best Nazi tradition.

  Then there was one German optimist, a deserter, who had a Ukrainian girl friend who had hidden him during the German withdrawal from Uman. He was now hopefully

  wondering whether the Russians wouldn't allow him to settle here in the Ukraine, which he thought a lovely country, and he was also most devoted to his Freundin. Such things do happen even in the best of regiments. But depressed and bewildered though they were by their defeats in the Ukraine, and, of course, personally upset at being taken prisoner by the Russians, with only the remotest prospect of seeing Germany again soon, there was still much fighting spirit left in many of the German soldiers I saw. They were hoping for something—they did not quite know what. Those from the Rhineland were more precise