The Witch of Stalingrad

by Justine Saracen

  “Yeeess? Go on.”

  “So, he wants to know if you’d like to go to Britain to photograph the buildup for the invasion.”

  “For God’s sake, Terry. I’ve just been in prison. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll just go. I told him yes, so he got you a place with the US Army Press Corps in London, and we’ve already got your tickets. Moscow—Teheran—London.”

  She sat stunned for a moment, but her mind was buzzing. Nothing awaited her in New York. Nothing and no one. No one awaited her in London either, but at least she’d still be a correspondent. Moreover, she had a better chance to monitor the POW camps from London than from New York.

  “I see. All right. I need to bathe and pack my cameras.”

  “Glad you agree. When you’re ready, I’ll take you to dinner tonight at the embassy. You look like you could use a good meal. Oh, by the way, Happy New Year 1944.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Lilya took stock of her new surroundings. With the exception of a few low buildings on the periphery for administration or to house the guards, the camp was little more than a barbed-wire expanse that kept prisoners in their thousands in the open air. Most had dug holes to crouch in to get away from the wind.

  Was it sentimentality toward women? The Wehrmacht wasn’t known for that. But for reasons she never discovered, her captors had brought her to a ramshackle wooden structure with a roof but no walls that might have once been a cowshed. Its dirt floor was covered with straw, and some dozen other women were already sitting on it huddled in various approximations of blankets.

  Shortly after her arrival, a Wehrmacht officer approached, and she recognized the man who’d interpreted during her interrogation in the previous camp. The Vlasov turncoat. “So, Lieutenant Petrovna,” he said, startling her with her new name.

  He stood over her now where she crouched on the straw-covered ground. “You know, you don’t have to endure this. I’m sure you think you’re doing the right thing, but you’re suffering for the wrong cause.”

  “Traitor,” she said, and turned away.

  But he persisted. “You think so? Ah, but as far as the Kremlin is concerned, you’re also a traitor, because you surrendered to the Germans.”

  “That’s not true. I was captured unconscious.”

  “That will make no difference when your countrymen come to liberate you.” She could hear the sarcasm in the word liberate. “Haven’t you heard? Stalin has declared, ‘There are no Russian POWs, only traitors and cowards.’ So once you’re over here, there’s no going back. If the NKVD doesn’t shoot you for desertion, they’ll send you to Siberia.”

  “It’s you who they’ll execute.” She snarled the words. “You and everyone who’s gone over to the Fascists. I’m a loyal Communist.”

  He leaned against one of the posts and crossed his arms. “I was, too. But Stalin isn’t. He’s just a brute and a tyrant. Don’t you know about the purges? Aren’t you tired of being afraid of denunciation for the slightest reason? Russian soldiers are crossing over in the hundreds to the Germans. They’re tired of having the commissars breathing down their necks and threatening their families, and they know the Red Army’s done for.”

  “Stop it. I don’t want to hear that. Leave me alone.”

  “I can leave you, if that’s what you want, but your shoulder bars show you’re a lieutenant. A woman who flies planes and reaches the rank of lieutenant so young must be pretty smart. I bet you already have a few medals. Such a woman deserves better than to live in terror of her own government.”

  “Right now I’m in terror of the Germans. Why aren’t you? Who are you, anyhow?”

  “Just call me Vovka, The others do. I accept the Germans because they’re the lesser evil. Sure, they’re brutal on the battlefield. That’s just the way war is. It’s the peace that they do differently. Stalin has ruined communism, and if the Germans can bring him down, I’ll fight with them. In the end, we’ll have a better life.”

  “How can you say that? You actually think that once the Germans seize Russia they’ll hand everything back to us and march home again?”

  “No, of course I don’t think that. But the Germans are a civilized people. They have courts of law.” He paused for a moment as if deciding how much to say. “You see, the NKVD executed my father as an enemy of the people. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “For years I assumed they were right, that all I had to do was prove I was a good Communist and all would be well. But I’ve seen the light.”

  She was speechless. That was his reason for defecting? He could have been telling her own story. What did it say about her, that her own father’s execution had done just the opposite and made her want to be a hero for the nation?

  “I imagine life under the Gestapo would be the same,” she said, but the force had gone out of her argument.

  “What’s left for us to fight for, then?” he asked, though his voice had dropped, as if his argument had lost its strength as well.

  “My father…” She stopped and started again. “I don’t fight for Stalin, but for the Motherland. For my family and home. The Germans are civilized, you say? We don’t even get the same rations as the other POWs, and we’re not allowed to get Red Cross packages.”

  “That’s because of Stalin, you stupid girl. He’s decreed that captured Soviet soldiers aren’t prisoners but traitors, so they’re ineligible for aid.”

  She had no reply, and they both were silent for a few moments. Then he brushed his hands, as if removing dirt from his gloves.

  “Well, each person must decide which devil to serve. But you shouldn’t let your idealism cause you to starve to death. The commandant’s wife needs a house cleaner. No matter how hard she works you, you’ll be indoors. Do you want the job or not?”

  “What makes you think the commandant will let a Russian into his house?”

  “A young, pretty one? Sure he will. So make up your mind soon.”

  With a dismissive flick of the hand, he turned and marched away, leaving her confused.

  “Don’t listen to him,” someone next to her said.

  Lilya turned to see a round face with dark hair and large eyebrows. One of the dozen women clustered together on straw. Close up, she could see it was a face that must have been pretty before the cuts and bruises of capture. A bit like Inna, Lilya thought, and felt immediate warmth. Her padded jacket suggested she’d been among the ground troops. “My name’s Olga,” the woman added.

  “Aleksandra,” Lilya said in return. “Do you know that man?”

  “Yes, and he’s a fool as well as a traitor. He remembers all the little crimes at home and shuts his eyes to the big ones here. You see those hills over there? On the other side of them is a great pit. It’s covered over now, but it’s full of bodies. Jews and Russians and commissars. That’s what they’ve planned for us.”

  “But we’re soldiers.”

  “Makes no difference. I was on a detachment outside the camp cleaning sewer ditches, and one of the Ukrainian guards joked that it would be a good pit to execute another batch of Bolsheviks over. His friend laughed and said, ‘Let them starve. We tried shooting them in the head and it took all day.’”

  Olga drew her knees up to her chin and pulled her jacket tighter around her. “It’s just a matter of luck whether you’re shot or not.”

  The other women, who’d withdrawn when Vlasov had entered the cowshed, now edged closer and surrounded them, listening.

  “So you think I shouldn’t try to get the job?” she asked Olga.

  “Oh, you must try. Grab it! Why should you play the martyr? I’d do it in a minute, if he offered it to me. But those bandages that hang out from your cuff? Take them off. They’re filthy. It looks like you’ve been wearing them for weeks.”

  “A month, actually. I have them around my ribs, too. They keep me warm.”

  “I’m sure they do, but the commandant won’t let you into the house if he thinks you’re sick or w
ounded. Here, let me help you.” She helped Lilya slide off her flight jacket and raised her tunic. With deft hands, she unwrapped the bandages from around her ribs. They were oily and discolored, but her ribs had healed well in the meantime, and the bandages were no longer necessary.

  “Now the arm.” Olga began unrolling the strips of rag that had protected her for a month. Her exposed skin felt cold and vulnerable, and her hand was stiff.

  “What did you do to break ribs and an arm? Crash a plane?”

  “Well, yes. But I was thrown out before it crashed.” She stared into Olga’s face, searching for recognition, but saw none.

  Once it had seemed all of Russia knew the face of their favorite female ace pilot, but her peroxided hair had grown out during the month of her captivity in the holding camp, and when the Vinnytsia barber had trimmed it short upon her arrival, all that was left was light-brown fuzz.

  Lilya looked down at Olga’s hands as they massaged life back into her weakened forearm. “Thanks, Olga. You’re good at this. Were you a medic?”

  “Almost. I trained to be one and was a medical instructor. But in ground training, they discovered what a good shot I was, and they made me a sniper.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Sixty-three kills. But the Fritzes caught me without my rifle, as I ran out to drag a wounded comrade to safety. I said I was a medic, and I’m sure that’s why they didn’t shoot me.”

  “I was a sniper too, and it’s a miracle that any one of us made it here,” another woman with a Tatar face said. “The Fritzes almost always shoot the women.”

  “For sure, when I get out of here, I’m going to shoot a few more of them,” Olga said.

  Lilya smiled softly, in spite of hunger, chill, and weakness. Olga had said “when.”

  *

  As Lilya expected, Commandant Krüger lived outside the grounds of the camp, in a two-story stone house that obviously had belonged to someone important before it was confiscated. A stand of trees protected him from the disagreeable sight of his emaciated and slowly dying prisoners.

  The commandant was not at home when Vovka accompanied her to the door, but the commandant’s wife received her. Frau Krüger was a hard-faced woman who might have once been attractive, but age had been unkind. Her graying hair was badly tinted, hair dye presumably being currently hard to obtain in the Ukraine, and her eyes drooped on the outside as if she were perpetually about to weep.

  Once she was inside, Frau Krüger led her to a door that opened to a cellar. Lilya obeyed the nudge at her elbow and descended the stairs into the darkness.

  The light from the corridor upstairs showed a single bulb hanging on a cord from the ceiling, and Frau Krüger tugged on its chain for light. The walls were cement block and the floor concrete. Under the wooden stairs they had just descended, a bin held coal, and Lilya assumed she would be tasked with bringing it up for the kitchen stove. Kitchen. Stove. The very words caused a spasm of hunger.

  Frau Krüger plucked at Lilya’s jacket sleeve, said something in German, and held her nose. Taking a bar of laundry soap from a shelf, she rubbed it on Lilya’s arm, making clear that a personal scrubbing was her first duty.

  “Jawohl, Frau Krüger.” The weeks of captivity had taught her at least that much German.

  Apparently satisfied that her order would be obeyed, the commandant’s wife returned to the upper floor and shut the door behind her.

  Lilya took off her wool flight jacket, then swept the dank cavern with her glance, searching for a place to wash. A sink stood in the corner, though a turn of the spigot revealed that it gave only cold water. Still, she obeyed and tugged off her uniform, then her rancid underwear, and stood, nude and shivering.

  By the dim overhead light, she could barely make out the gray spots of the lice that infested her, but she could feel them crawl across her belly and between her breasts. She sluiced water over her chest and neck and then rubbed the laundry soap over every part of her body she could reach, scratching off the vile insects.

  She scrubbed her underwear next and planned to put her soiled uniform on without it while she waited for it to dry. But she heard footsteps behind her and turned.

  Frau Krüger stood on the stairs with a man’s woolen shirt in her hand. She tossed it across the distance between them and made an about-face.

  Lilya drew the shirt gratefully over her damp body and buttoned it closed. It covered her to mid thigh. The concrete floor was intolerably cold, so she drew on her boots again, feeling strange with exposed knees. Then she set about scrubbing her uniform. She would never be able to remove the stains from the weeks lying on the ground, but the smell would be gone, and so would the lice. At least for a while.

  Before she was finished, Frau Krüger was behind her again, this time with a wide metal tub of dirty clothing. Her commands in German were unintelligible, but the task was clear. She pointed toward a series of wires stretched between pillars around the cellar, obviously for purposes of drying.

  “Jawohl, Frau Krüger,” Lilya said again. She took the tub and set it at her feet. “Wasser kalt,” she announced in more of the baby German she’d learned. How was she supposed to do a laundry with cold water?

  Seemingly irritated by the remark, Frau Krüger turned abruptly and climbed the stairs. Lilya had filled the sink halfway with cold water when Frau Krüger returned with a large copper kettle that gave off steam from its spout. She spoke again in German, and Lilya presumed it was something like “Don’t waste it.”

  Hot water. It seemed like paradise, and she would have welcomed it for her own scrubbing. On the plank table beside her, she laid out the soiled laundry in order of importance. The commandant’s underwear and shirts, then Frau Krüger’s clothing, and finally the bed linen and miscellanea. She only hoped the soap—and her arm strength—would last.

  Two-and-a-half hours later, her arms ached up to her shoulders and her back was stiff. But all the laundry was clean and hanging on its wires. However, her own uniform was still damp. Would she be allowed to stay until it dried?

  No one had come down to check on her, so she climbed to the top of the stairs and poked her head timidly through the door opening.

  Frau Krüger stepped from the kitchen at the other end of the corridor with a bucket and rags and pressed them into Lilya’s hand. The meaning was obvious.

  “Jawohl, Frau Krüger.” She scampered back down the stairs and filled the bucket from the basement sink. It was a strain on her barely healed arm to carry it full of water to the upstairs corridor, and she set it down with a thud.

  She knelt on the wooden floor and began to scrub with the cold, wet rags. Her arms were so weak that scrubbing was painful, but after half an hour the job was largely done, and she stood back to inspect the floor for any missed dirt. At that moment, the front door opened.

  Commandant Krüger stopped in the doorway and smirked at her standing barelegged under his shirt. He slid his glance from her face to her breasts to her bare knees, then strode past her into the kitchen, leaving behind him a trail of wet boot prints.

  Helpless to object, she rinsed her rag in the bucket of brown water and dragged it once again back and forth the length of the corridor. As she neared the kitchen, she almost fainted from the smell of frying sausage.

  She was hungry every hour of every day, as were all the prisoners, and in the absence of food, hunger became disassociated from the stomach and seemed to grip the entire body. But with food close by, filling the air with the scent of warm fat, hunger became a sharp physical pain as digestive acids arose in her stomach and had nothing to digest.

  To escape the odor, she returned to the cellar and emptied the bucket. Her underwear was dry, but her uniform was still slightly damp, and pulling on trousers and tunic made her shiver. Her woolen flight jacket warmed her only slightly.

  Not sure whether she had more tasks to do, she marched again up the stairs and called from the doorway. Frau Krüger stepped from the kitchen, bringing the smell of roast pork with her, and inspected the
corridor floor. The cleaning seemed to pass muster, for she turned away with a wave of dismissal and returned to the kitchen.

  Buttoning her jacket, Lilya left the commandant’s house aching and cold, guarded by a Kapo along the short path back to the women’s corner. To her relief, she arrived back at the cowshed in time for the thin evening broth they called soup. As usual, it was made from nettles, and she consumed it quickly while it was still warm, picking out the straw that couldn’t be digested, no matter how long she chewed it.

  While they sat eating, a plane flew overhead, and she heard the clatter of U-2 biplane motors. A few minutes later, in the far distance, she saw an orange glow, then another, and then a third. Her heart leapt. It had to be the biplanes of the 588th on a sortie. The Night Witches tormenting the German troops.

  Who had been in the planes? She ran through the names of the pilots who still lived: Nadia, Polina, Ludmila? Perhaps it was Eva Bershanskaya herself. She thought affectionately of the tall, muscular commander.

  Comforted, she returned to the cluster of women who were already making up the straw “nest” where they slept in a tight group at night, the stronger women taking turns sleeping on the outside. When she fell asleep, she dreamt again of flying.

  The next day was much the same as the one before, though the laundry she’d washed now had to be ironed. She ironed with her left hand, sparing her right arm, but standing for several hours in one place hurt her back and legs. Still, she was indoors, and the electric iron radiated warmth.

  The following days of hard physical labor left her bone tired, but she could see that the women who worked outside suffered more. They seemed to waste away, and though she was just as ravenous as they when the soup canister arrived, she was able to stand in line for the weakest of them and take their bowls of nettle broth to them where they lay.