The Witch of Stalingrad

by Justine Saracen

  Strange, she thought, how absolute helplessness offered a kind of freedom, particularly if you weren’t afraid of death. At that moment, she was not. Her only regret was that her mother would mourn. And Alex.

  The truck began to move and she fell in and out of a stupor until, hours later, the sound of the rear doors opening again penetrated the gray soup she floated in. A man climbed into the vehicle.

  “You’re the pilot?”

  “Yes, Aleksandra Petrovna.” She felt a twinge of pleasure at maintaining the lie.

  “Well, Aleksandra Petrovna, I am Pyotr Stepanov. Also a prisoner, but I’m a doctor. The Germans are letting me look after you.” He waved over another man and together they slid her stretcher from the truck.

  As they bore her along a path to the camp entrance, she looked to the side. The camp seemed to be nothing but an open field surrounded by barbed wire. Within the wire thousands of men sat or lay on the ground.

  Dr. Stepanov held the stretcher at her feet and looked down at her. “You’re lucky. I can’t do much for your injuries, but the Germans have never seen a woman pilot before, so you’re a novelty. They’re letting me keep you in the medical tent. I have nothing to treat you with, but at least you’ll be covered when it rains.”

  “Uh-hunh.” She grunted agreement. Her broken forearm pulsed with pain and she was feverish. The thought of lying in the cooling rain wasn’t at all unpleasant.

  He was right about the medical tent. It was simply a covered version of the open field. Men lay on the ground next to each other moaning or unconscious and the revolting odor told her some had dysentery.

  Stepanov and the other stretcher-bearer carried her to a corner and lifted her off the stretcher. She cried out from the pain of being lifted and then lay panting. “Please, can I have more water?”

  “That’s another advantage to being here,” he said, standing up. “You don’t get any extra food, but we have plenty of water.”

  He returned with a tin cup that he held to her mouth, and the cool water gave her instant relief. While he was still kneeling beside her, a German officer came into the tent, tapped his thigh with a baton, and said something in German. It must have been something witty, because he chortled.

  Stepanov translated. “He asked how you lost your plane?”

  She didn’t think he expected a reply.

  The officer continued, still in a jocular tone, and the only word she understood was “Soviet.”

  “He asks if the Soviet Air Force is so desperate that it uses women.”

  That, too, seemed like the remark of a man trying to be clever rather than seeking information. What should she say? It would be folly to reply with a wisecrack of her own, yet she couldn’t bring herself to be servile.

  “Every Russian struggles for the Motherland,” she said, and the doctor repeated in German.

  The officer made another remark and his expression told her he mocked her. Then, to her horror, he summoned another officer, who aimed a little box camera at her and snapped a photo.

  “He says that he’s supposed to shoot women in uniform, but you’re the only female pilot in the camp, and he wants to show his wife a picture of you,” Stepanov explained. “And he wants to know how old you are.”

  She saw no harm in answering. “Twenty-one.”

  “Twenty-one,” the officer exclaimed. “And already a pilot.”

  “I was flying at sixteen,” she boasted, then regretted it instantly. She was allowing him to engage her and giving more information than she was allowed.

  But the officer merely shook his head in disbelief and turned away, taking his cameraman with him.

  “Dr. Stepanov.” She implored him when they’d left. “What do I look like?”

  “If you’re worried that you aren’t attractive in the photo, I regret to tell you, you’re correct. Aside from being rather dirty, your entire face is swollen and both your eyes are ringed in black. I’m sure you’re a very pretty girl, but right now, your own mother wouldn’t recognize you.”

  She sighed relief. If the photo somehow made its way back to Russia, at least it wouldn’t reveal who she was.

  “Now you must let me examine you and wash you. We have only cold water and no soap, but it’s better than the men are getting outside in the field.”

  He helped her to a sitting position but she cried out. “My arm. I think it’s broken.”

  “All right, we’ll check all of that. Here, let’s take off your flight jacket.”

  She drew back from his touch.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll respect your modesty. But I have to be able to identify what bones are broken. You mustn’t be afraid of a doctor’s hands.”

  “No, it’s just…” She never finished the sentence because at that moment he’d opened her jacket and seen the medals on her tunic.

  “Oh my. It seems you’re not only a pilot, but a very good one.” He leaned forward to study them. “Medals for bravery, special aviation, parachuting, and…for the defense of Stalingrad.” He sat back, studying her for the first time, then swept his wet rag over her cheeks.

  “Blond hair, blue eyes,” he murmured. “A fighter at Stalingrad. I know who you are.”

  She raised her good hand and pushed away the rag. “Please. You can’t let them know. They’ll make propaganda with me. I can never go back.”

  “The men who captured you, they didn’t find any identification?”

  “I don’t carry any. If I crash, my comrades will know my plane. But I’d never want the enemy to know who I am.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I understand. But the medals. We’ll have to get rid of them.”

  “Yes, please.” She struggled to help him remove the flight jacket and tunic, though drawing her broken arm through the sleeve was a torment.

  Stepanov washed the shoulder burn with cold water. “We should cover it, too, until it heals.

  “Can you use my scarf?” She untied the blue polka-dot silk with her good hand.

  “Yes. I’ll rinse it in water first. It’s at least cleaner than your uniform.”

  When the silk had dried, he used it to wrap the shoulder. He also collected enough rags to wrap her chest, forearm, and wrist, and immobilize the arm. Though it ached terribly, it was a relief to not have to endure the cutting pain that wracked her with every sudden movement.

  “I had a daughter about your age. She was a medic assisting me and was killed when I was captured.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “She was lucky to have a father like you.”

  *

  The stories of Russian prisoners being tortured appeared to be both false and true. Though the camp guards sometimes kicked her or spat at her when they passed, they otherwise ignored her, and her only interrogator was the officer who’d taken her picture.

  She cooperated and defied him at the same time. It was easy to create a mix of truth and lies, to narrate a tale that told them little more than they already knew, that the Soviet Air Force was growing daily in strength, that they had air superiority over all of Russia and ever more of the Ukraine. She gave him the coordinates of an air base they’d long abandoned, and since it corresponded with his own reconnaissance reports, he believed her.

  “Such a waste of an attractive girl,” he said finally. “My daughter is only ten, safe at home and in school. I can’t imagine how a man can let his daughter go into battle. But I suppose your father loved Stalin more than his family.”

  She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. How could she explain to this smug Nazi that her father didn’t love Stalin, and that opposing him had cost him his life? Duty, patriotism, family loyalty all swam together in her mind, confusing her, and she was relieved when he left.

  The fractures in her ribs and forearm, which Stepanov assured her were “clean,” seemed to slowly heal, the bones knitting together again by themselves over the weeks. Her main torture was always hunger. All around her she saw men dying, but the novelty of her being a woman pilot gave her eno
ugh status that the stronger of the other prisoners brought her scraps of their own scarce bread.

  Stepanov was like a guardian angel, particularly in the beginning when she was most helpless. Gentleman that he was, in the first few days, he even helped her to the latrine pit and turned his back while she fumbled with her breeches to take care of her needs.

  September came, and, though weak from hunger, she could finally take a deep breath without pain and use both her hands again. In spite of her improvement, she left the bandages around her chest and arms for the warmth they provided in the cooling autumn air.

  The interrogating officer returned once or twice, perhaps to satisfy his curiosity about how a woman POW could get along. Each time he clucked in disapproval at her very existence, comparing her with his own well-protected daughter. The two fathers, Stepanov and the camp officer, presented a troubling puzzle. Who was the good father? The one who brought his daughter into battle and lost her, or the one who sheltered her at home while killing the daughters of other men? And what did it say about her own father, who had done neither?

  October came, and ever more Soviet planes flew overhead. Surely that meant the Russian line was advancing. Surely it meant liberation.

  But instead, early one morning one of the camp officers entered the medical tent. “Everyone on your feet. We’re moving the prisoners westward.”

  With Stepanov’s help, she stood up and joined the line shuffling from the tent. What would happen to the patients who were too weak to walk?

  The answer came immediately as a guard walked along the rows of helpless men with his pistol drawn. “Get up,” he ordered each one, and if the patients were unconscious or too weak to stand, he shot them through the head.

  Stepanov was outraged. “You can’t do that! They’re soldiers just like you.” He tried to brush aside the pistol that was pointed at a cringing and already skeletal man. Without a word, the guard swung it around and shot him in the chest, then turned it back to fire a second time into the patient’s head.

  Lilya tried to go to Stepanov’s side, but someone seized her by the upper arm and drew her back. It was the interrogating officer. “Don’t fight back if you want to stay alive,” he said, and shoved her into the shuffling line.

  Outside she heard hundreds of more shots and cringed, knowing each one was an execution. Nonetheless, she stumbled along in the middle of the wide line that curved westward across the scorched Ukrainian landscape.

  The padded summer flight jacket she had been captured in was designed for open-air flying, so it gave her an advantage over the men in summer uniforms. She was warm enough for the moment but wasn’t prepared for the Russian winter.

  They marched in a sluggish column through the day and were allowed to collapse at night, and any who couldn’t rise and march again in the morning were shot. She lost count of the days, but when they finally passed through a town, one of the men in the line near her said, “I know this place. It’s Vinnytsia.”

  Just then, it began to snow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A week passed after the announcement of Lilya’s plane crash, and then another, and Alex herself couldn’t have said why she stayed. Perhaps it was inertia, the paralysis of someone whose reason for going on had been snatched away. Perhaps she also sensed a bit of Lilya in the women’s regiment that was her family and could not yet tear herself away from it.

  In November, the autumn rains turned to snow, and she even considered returning to New York to central heating, good food, and privacy. But she imagined herself in her apartment on 112th Street and found the thought bleak. She didn’t even have a cat.

  Inna had also transferred back to the night bombers, and they sat sometimes together in their wretched dugout next to the oil-drum stove like bereaved sisters. But during the all-night bombing raids, a camaraderie existed among the women that she loved and that held her, at least until she could gather the strength to start life over.

  Then on a blustery December day, when she emerged from the dugout to go for what passed for breakfast, Major Bershanskaya stopped her.

  “I hear you know how to fly the U-2,” she said.

  “Well, I flew one once, over Stalingrad. Not my best day, though. I crashed into a snowdrift.”

  Bershanskaya wrinkled her nose. “Not a glowing recommendation, is it? But still, we have a job that needs doing, and we’re shorthanded.”

  “What? You want me to go on a bombing mission?” Alex was horrified.

  “No, nothing as risky as that. But partisan bands are working behind the enemy lines, more or less under Red Army command. One of them, the Kovitch band, has become our responsibility, and we’ll be flying food and ammunition to them. We have the planes and the navigators, and now the supplies, but not enough pilots. All the women are assigned to the bombing raids.”

  “Deliveries? In enemy territory?”

  “Yes, but you’ll be far from enemy concentrations. You drop the containers without landing and then fly back. In the dark it’s pretty safe. We’ll give you a couple of days to practice on the U-2s. What do you think?”

  Alex considered the dangers. She’d never flown in the dark and had absolutely no idea how to land without lights. Moreover, as a foreign journalist, flying such a mission would probably also be breaking some kind of international law. It was lunacy.

  “Sure, I’ll go. You’ll have to get me a flight suit, though. The last time I was in the air, I nearly froze to death.”

  “Come to my quarters after the meal and meet your navigator, Valentina. I’ll have a flight suit for you, too.”

  *

  The sun was just setting over the sparse trees on the horizon when Alex strode out onto the airfield. She flexed her arms and legs, testing her mobility under the thick, padded jacket and breeches. She’d insisted on keeping her own Macy’s fur-lined lace-up boots rather than the oilskin boots issued to the Russian pilots. Also unlike them, she wore thick socks instead of footcloths, and her own winter gloves.

  In the last light of the winter afternoon, she pulled the flaps of the fur cap over her ears and watched the ground crew finish loading the cylinders into the bomb cradles under the wings. Valentina appeared next to her, and they marched together toward the biplane.

  “I presume you know where we’re going,” Alex said, patting the fuselage as if it were the flank of a horse.

  “Sure, I do. I’ll show you.” Valentina spread out the map of their route on the tail wing of the plane. “We start here.” She tapped with her gloved finger on a corner of the map. “Then we fly basically southwest over Volodarka.” She traced a line diagonally across the paper. “The drop zone is here, just east of Vinnytsia.” She folded the map. “We don’t have to land, just come in as low as possible and drop the containers like bombs. Kovitch’s men will come onto the field and fetch them.”

  “You’re sure you can get us there in the dark?”

  “It’s what we navigators do. Besides, I know the zone pretty well. You just fly us there while I read off the map and the compass. We have in-plane radios now, so I’ll tell you when to change heading and when we’re at the drop site. If we’re in the right spot, the partisans will hear our motor and set up signal lights.”

  “All right. If you say so.” Thrilled and terrified in equal measure, Alex climbed into the pilot’s cockpit, buckled herself in, and set on her headphones, while behind her Valentina did the same.

  The little U-2 fishtailed slightly as it rumbled along the short runway, but soon they were aloft and gaining altitude. She watched the altimeter as they climbed, and the snow-sprinkled ground receded below them.

  Valentina’s voice came through the earphones. “When we reach 1,000 meters, head west by southwest. That will take us over Volodarka, which is on a bay, on the northwest side. I’ll be timing us, but in general, you’ll follow the river southwest. It’s another hundred or so kilometers to Vinnytsia.”

  Alex obeyed, concentrating on keeping the plane level and at the righ
t altitude. The night was clear, and it was quite easy to follow the rivers that snaked across the landscape reflecting silver in the moonlight. Where the lines became white ice, she maintained heading and rediscovered them where they widened and became open water again.

  “It’s pretty calm. Is it because the Germans can’t see us, or do they not have any flak left?”

  “I wouldn’t bank on that. There’s still heavy fighting in this part of the Ukraine, flak included. That’s why the partisans need our supplies. But we should be at the drop spot now. Go down to 500 meters and circle. As soon as we see the light pattern, we’ll know it’s them.”

  Alex circled, as ordered, until Valentina called out, “There it is at four o’clock. You see it? The L pattern. Swing around so you can approach down the long arm of the L and get to about one hundred meters when we’re at the bottom.”

  “One hundred meters, eh? Why don’t you ask for twenty, while you’re at it?”

  “Twenty meters? Can you do that? That’d be wonderful.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  Alex aimed for the foot of the L below them and watched the altimeter. Two hundred meters, one hundred fifty, one hundred. But they were still some distance from the target. She took a chance, calling out, “Ninety…eighty…seventy…sixty-five. Cargo away!”

  With one hand she yanked on the wires that opened the cradles holding the containers, while with the other she pulled back on the control stick. The added speed along with the sudden lightening of their weight caused them to shoot up over the trees at the end of the clearing.

  “Well done, Alex. Well done. Now, as soon as you gain altitude, curve back and reverse course. We’ll follow the same rivers back.”

  Alex continued climbing, still heading westward. When she finally leveled out, she peered over the edge of the cockpit. “What’s that below? Everything else is in blackout, but something down there’s lit up. Aren’t they afraid of night bombers?”