than the others. The allied bombing had made them angry, rather than downhearted. I
remember a sergeant, Willi Jerschagen, from Remscheid on the Rhine. The town had
been bombed to blazes, and yet his wife and parents were still living there among the ruins. His wife had a job in a steel mill, and had no intention of going away to any other part of Germany. "It'll be the same everywhere, so I might as well stay here," she had written recently.
And the great hope of this woman, and of Willi himself, and of other people of Western Germany was— Vergeltung. The Führer had promised this revenge on England; but they were growing impatient, and the people in Western Germany were now saying: "What about these weapons?" The V-1's over London were, indeed, not to start until a little later.
As the Germans were being pushed out of the Ukraine the songs the Wehrmacht sang
began to have a mournful note. These ditties were very similar, though every regiment seemed to have its own variant. They went like this:—
Nema kurka, nema yaika,
Dosvidania khozyaika; or
Nema pivo, nema vino,
Dosvidania Ukraina; or
Nema kurka, nema brot,
Dosvidania Belgorod; or
Nema kurka, nema soup,
Dosvidania Kremenchug,
which, in this mixture of German, pidgin Russian and pidgin Ukrainian, means—"No more chicken, no more eggs, good-bye, landlady; No more beer and no more wine, goodbye, Ukraine; No more chicken, no more bread, good-bye, Belgorod; No more chicken,
no more soup, good-bye Kremcnchug". And many more on the same lines. And, more
generally, the bitter disappointment and disillusionment was expressed in these lines, known to every German soldier:
"Es ist alles vorueber, es ist alles vorbei,
Drei Jahre in Russland und nix ponimai",—
"It is all over, it is all gone; three years in Russia, and can't understand anything".
Chapter III CLOSE-UP II: ODESSA, CAPITAL OF RUMANIAN
TRANSNIESTRIA
April and May 1944 saw the final expulsion of the Germans from the southern parts of the Ukraine. The troops of Konev's 2nd Ukrainian Front swept all the way into northern Rumania, and it was not till they had reached a line some twelve miles east of Jassy that the front became temporarily stabilised. On April 2 Molotov, announcing the invasion of Rumania, hastened to declare that the Soviet Union did not aim at altering the "social order" (i.e. capitalism) in that country. The troops of Malinovsky's 3rd Ukrainian Front had meantime advanced along the Black Sea coast, liberating Kherson, Nikolaev and
Odessa, and, on April 11, the beginning of the Russian invasion of the Crimea, Hitler's last stronghold on the Black Sea, was announced. Within a month, the Crimea was
cleared.
The great peculiarity of Odessa, "the Russian Marseilles" was that, except for the last few weeks when the Germans took over, it had not been under German rule. As a reward for Rumania's participation in the war against the Soviet Union, Hitler had given her a large and rich territory in the southern Ukraine stretching all the way from Bessarabia to the Bug; this included the great Black Sea port of Odessa, and the whole area was
incorporated into "greater Rumania" as a new province under the name of Trans-niestria (i.e. the land beyond the Dniester).
Malinovsky liberated Odessa on April 10, and the Germans, fearing encirclement, had
left in a frantic hurry, some by sea, under almost constant Russian bombing and shellfire, others by the last remaining road between Odessa and the Dniester estuary, where a ferry took them across to the parts of Bessarabia and Rumania which the Russians had not yet occupied. By the time Odessa fell, this road was littered with hundreds of
wrecked and abandoned German vehicles. Though in a desperate hurry to get out of
Odessa, the Germans had had time to turn the harbour, most of the factories and many other large buildings, into smouldering heaps of wreckage.
I drove to Odessa on a beautiful spring day in mid-April from a point just north of
Nikolaev, on the east side of the Bug. The Bug had been the frontier between German-
occupied and Rumanian-annexed Ukraine, and civilians were not allowed to travel
between the two except by very special permission. But since February 1944 the
Germans no longer took any notice of the fiction of "Trans-niestria" being part of Rumania.
They had tried to drive away the cattle; but as they could not get the cows across the Bug, they shot them, and the green banks of the river were littered with dozens of brown
carcasses of dead cows which were beginning to stink.
It was typical steppe country between the Bug and Odessa, and sometimes there was no village in sight for miles as one drove between the immense green carpets of winter
wheat which had been duly sown in the autumn, and which the Russians were now going
to harvest.
Here and there, there were fallow patches, but not many. But one of the strangest sights on this road were some completely deserted villages; they did not look like Russian or Ukrainian villages. Their houses were painted in bright colours, and they had spired churches —Lutheran churches, or maybe Catholic churches, for by the roadside there
were also one or two Catholic shrines. These were German villages—villages of German colonists who had lived here for 150 years, and had latterly acted as quislings
everywhere, filling administrative and police jobs placed at their disposal by the Germans on the eastern side of the Bug. Those who had stayed in this "Greater Rumania", had acted as an arrogant German minority, and had no doubt already been preparing
unpleasant surprises for the Rumanian "majority". But the rapid advance of the Red Army had obliged them to abandon their homes. Later, in Odessa, I was to see a paper called Der Deutsche in Transniestrien, in which the province was in fact treated as part of the German heritage, and the Rumanians were not mentioned once! Nevertheless, until
only a few weeks before, Hitler still felt obliged to keep up the myth of Greater Rumania, and the pretence that Transniestria was a Rumanian province and Odessa a Rumanian
city.
We approached Odessa at dusk, and as we drove towards the Black Sea, the country
became hillier, and here and there were signs of fighting. All along the road we had passed many dead horses, and here, on these wind-swept hills above the Black Sea there were many more, and some bomb craters, and, here and there, some dead men. At one
point we passed an enormous war memorial the Rumanians had erected to commemorate
their Odessa victory of 1941. It was here, through these hills, that the Russian ring of defences round Odessa then ran.
And then we came to Odessa, and in the streets there was a sharp smell of burning.
Odessa was completely dark. All the power stations had been blown up by the Germans
who had full control of the city in the last fortnight and, worse still, there was no water—
except for very limited quantities drawn from Artesian wells inside the city. The normal supply of water came from the Dniester, thirty or forty miles away, and the mains had been blown up. Now, as during the two months' siege in the grim autumn of 1941,
Odessa was relying on its own wells. At the Hotel Bristol, where we stayed, the washing ration was one bottle per day.
This Bristol Hotel, a great big absurd-looking building with ornate caryatids going three storeys up, was in Pushkin Street, and all its windows were broken. It had two hall
porters, an old man with a black beard, a former Odessa docker or bendyuzhnik, with a gruff voice and loud ugly laugh, and his assistant, a little old man with a grey barbiche and a leer. The two of them would stand on the pavement outside, and, watching the
Odessa girls in their light dresses walk past in groups of four or five, they would make lewd remarks, and the little man with the grey barbiche and the leer would then tell remar
kable anecdotes, for instance about two girls who were living in the same house as himself, and of how the one specialised in Rumanian, and the other in German officers, and how they would compare notes.
No inhibitions here. This was Odessa with its perpetual whiff of the underworld, which recalled the glories of Isaac Babel's Benya Krik, the king of the Odessa gangsters, and which even a hundred years of Soviet rule may never quite eradicate.
It wasn't quite the Odessa one had known in the past. For one thing, it was an Odessa without Jews, and they had been an essential part of the Black Sea port—they and the Armenians and Greeks and other Mediterranean or quasi-Mediterranean fauna.
But there was still the Odessite who, whether he was Ukrainian, or Russian, or
Moldavian, was Odessite first and foremost, speaking a jargon of his own, with his own idiom and his own accent. Obviously, many of them took like a duck to water to the
seemingly easy-going life of Antonescu's Odessa, with its restaurants and black market, its brothels and gambling dens, lotto clubs and cabarets, and its semblance of European culture, complete with opera, ballet and symphony concerts.
There were the Siguranza, the Rumanian secret police, and the Bolshevik underground—
literally underground in the Odessa catacombs—and the Jews, many thousands of whom
had been murdered by the Rumanians; but the occupation (or rather, annexation) régime was different in many other ways from the German occupation régime I had seen in cities like Voronezh, Orel or Kharkov.
While the Axis's prospects of winning the war seemed good, the Rumanians were
planning to turn Odessa into a sort of brighter and better Bucharest. Not only were there the restaurants, and shops and gambling dens, and the solemn appearance of Antonescu in the former Imperial Box at the Opera, but there was a serious attempt to convince the people that they were, and were going to remain, part of Greater Rumania. Unlike the Germans in occupied cities, the Rumanians did not close down either the University or the schools; school-children had to learn Rumanian, and university students were warned that if they did not learn Rumanian within a year, they would be expelled—though after Stalingrad the Rumanians were no longer insistent on this point. They continued to
distribute a Rumanian geography book, translated into Russian, which demonstrated that practically the whole of southern Russia was, "geopolitically", part of Rumania and was largely inhabited by descendants of the ancient Dacians. Those who could prove any
Moldavian blood were promised various privileges: to have a Jewish grandmother was
dangerous, but to have a Moldavian grandparent was like a title of nobility.
There was one aspect of Odessa which was not to be found in any of the German-
occupied cities. Odessa was full of young people. It was a happy fluke: the Rumanians had regarded "Transniestria" as part of their country, and its inhabitants as future Rumanian citizens. No doubt, after Stalingrad, they were no longer so sure about keeping Odessa, but the fiction still had to be kept up. Therefore, the great majority of young people in Odessa were not deported to Germany, or anywhere else. Nor had they been
called up into the Rumanian Army, since they were totally unreliable from the Rumanian point of view. Only during the last few weeks, when the Germans had taken over, were some unlucky Odessites deported to Germany; but most had dodged deportation, thanks, partly, to the Soviet underground.
During those first days of the liberation, there were still plenty of signs of the Rumanian occupation régime that had lasted for two-and-a-half years.
All down Pushkin Street (spelled Pušchin on the white-and-blue Rumanian street plates that were now being taken down) and the other famous acacia-lined Odessa streets,
named after the city's 18th century French founders (Richelieu, De Ribas, Langeron)
there were still advertisements of lotto clubs and cabarets, and shop-signs with Bodega written on them (the Bodegas were now closed) and remnants of a proclamation printed in Rumanian, German and Russian (but not Ukrainian): "We Ion Antonescu, Marshal of Rumania, Professor L. Alexeanu, Civil Governor of Transniestria", etc., etc. A large building had a notice up: "Guvernamantul Trans-nistriei", and the bus signs—not that there were any buses now— said that the first bus from the Aeroport to La Gara (Station) left at 7.15 a.m. The musical programmes referred to the "Teatrul de Opera & Balet, Odesa" —which, incidentally, showed that it was not true that the city had been re-named Antonescu, and had merely lost one s. There had been many other entertainments in Odessa, even the Symphony Orchestra of the Luftwaffe had given a concert— though
this was on March 27, during the German régime—and they played Schubert's
Unfinished, and Beethoven's Violin Concerto, and Tschaikovsky's Fifth. There were also several dressmakers' ateliers, and many other small shops, whose proprietors had now vanished. Free Trade—of sorts—seemed to have been in full swing in Odessa while the
Rumanians were there. The Rumanians were speculators, and half the people of Odessa, and more perhaps, were speculators, too. Was not speculation and trade in the Odessite's blood? Rumanian generals used to bring whole trunkloads of ladies' underwear and
stockings from Bucharest, and get their orderlies to sell them in the market. Even now there were quite a few things to buy in the market—German pencils, Hungarian
cigarettes, German cigarettes (called "Krim", and made in the Crimea), and even bottles of scent—and some stockings, though these were becoming scarce now, and could only
be bought under the counter. Now the militia was keeping an eye on all this trading, and the Odessites in the market looked somewhat subdued. The noisiest person was a blind man, accompanied by an old woman who rattled her moneybox in people's faces; and the blind man was singing in a whining penetrating voice:
Znayut vse moyu kvartiru,
Tam zhivu sredi mogil,
Rvalis tam snaryady zlyie,
Zhizn svoyu tam polozhil.
("Everybody knows my dwelling;
There I live among the graves,
Where the wicked shells were bursting,
There I lost my youthful life.")
They were selling jam at twenty roubles a pot and bread at ten roubles a kilo (which was very cheap); there was plenty of milk, and they were also selling German bottles of
apple-juice. The silk stocking under the counter were now fetching 300 roubles.
[Nominally £6, but the value of Russian currency (except for rationed goods) had
depreciated so much during the war that the figure is meaningless.]
And the saleswomen were still talking of marks when they meant roubles. The wrapping paper used was German newspapers.
Later, all these "New Order" luxuries were to disappear, and prices went up.
Although the port with its docks and grain elevators was a heap of smouldering ruins, the famous marine promenade overlooking the port and the sea was crowded as usual with
young people. Many of them were sitting on benches or on the steps of the Great
Staircase (of Eisenstein's Potemkin tame). I remember, in particular, two youngsters—
one fair, the other with the beginnings of a black moustache, who were commenting, in their Odessa jargon, on the terrible destruction the Germans had caused to the port and other parts of the city—particularly to the factories at Moldovanka and Peresyp. They also recalled how, during the last fortnight of the German occupation, they and their friends had hidden in cellars and in the catacombs—for it was no good going out into the street, not even before the 3 p.m. curfew, because the Germans might nab you, and deport you to Germany, or simply kill you. They used elaborately abusive language about the Germans, and said the Rumanians were exceedingly fed-up when the Germans took
everything over in February. "I wonder," black moustache said, "what the Reds are going to do about sea bathing." (In Odessa, too, many talked about "The Reds"). During the previous summer, he said, the Rumanians ha
d allowed only one beach to be used, and on hot days as many as 20,000 people would queue up. Now that the damned Germans had
mined all the beaches, there mightn't be any bathing at all this year. On the whole, they were pleased that the "Reds" had come, because it was really terrifying under the Germans. The Rumanians at least left "most people" in peace, though others, especially the Jews, had had great trouble with the Siguranza. But, on the whole, the Rumanians didn't interfere too much with people. Mozhno bylo zhit—"one could live", and there was plenty of food in the market, and the Rumanian soldiers always had a variety of things to sell.
"What happened to the Jews?" I asked. "Oh," said the fair-haired boy, "they say they bumped off an awful lot, but I didn't see it. Some were allowed to escape—with a little money you could buy anything from the Rumanians, even a passport in the name of Richelieu. We had a family of Jews living in our cellar; and we took them food once a week. The Rumanian cops knew about them, but didn't bother. They said that if so many Jews were bumped off, it was because the Germans had demanded it. 'No dead Jews, no
Odessa', they said. Anyway, that's what the Rumanians told us."
Professor Alexeanu, the civil governor of the Transniestria, had taken up his residence in the beautiful Vorontzov Palace on the Marine Promenade; in Soviet times it had been
turned into the Pioneers' Palace. Now it was going to be turned into the Pioneers' Palace once again. Alexeanu, people in Odessa said, had been rather easy-going, except that he gave the Siguranza an entirely free hand. When he was removed in February 1944, it was because of the terrible amount of embezzlement of which he was said to be guilty. He did not spend his money on civic welfare, but rather, on a nice pair of legs. True, he
pretended to be interested in the welfare of schools and the university, and it wasn't until the Germans came in February 1944 that the university laboratories and everything else were looted. Alexeanu, as somebody said, "was tall, long-faced, with brown hair, the kind of man women like". His chef de cabinet was one Cherkavsky, a White Russian, but the bulk of Alexeanu's staff came from Bucharest.
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