The Witch of Stalingrad

by Justine Saracen

  “What about war correspondents? Do you think we should have something similar? ‘We band of camera shutterbugs and paparazzi.’ Something like that?”

  He laughed a warm, rich chuckle. “I’ve seen your Eastern Front photos. You’re good.”

  “I hear you are, too,” she joked. “Are you going over?”

  “Yes, in the second wave.”

  “Good luck to you. I’ve been under fire, but in a plane. I wouldn’t relish standing hip deep in water with only a camera when it’s raining bullets.”

  “I suppose it’s a sort of a ‘Henry V Saint Crispin’s day’ thing. I’m in it for the glory. If I make it, men will speak of me. What about you?”

  “I’m going over in a couple of weeks. No glory involved.”

  He looked at her quizzically, as if wondering what other reason a photographer would have for entering a theater of war. “All right, then. Maybe I’ll see you there.” He closed his umbrella, leaving her in the rain, and returned to the depot.

  She stood for a few moments longer, glad he hadn’t asked why she was returning. She couldn’t have told him that it was to find a woman she wasn’t allowed to love.

  *

  On D-day plus three weeks she got her press pass, along with the order to report to the army quartermaster’s store to be uniformed as a war correspondent. A group of Wacs assigned to the supreme commander’s headquarters would be crossing the channel the next day, and she was scheduled to join them.

  The faux officer’s uniform provided by the US military to its journalists was almost identical to the one she’d worn when she arrived in Moscow. The jacket of this one, however, had WAR CORRESPONDENT stitched over the left breast pocket and on the left shoulder patch. The army-issue trousers were too wide, though, and she smiled to herself, thinking of the clownish breeches of the night bombers.

  Twenty-four hours later, she was on landing craft LCVP 105 along with the Wacs, a dozen crates of communication equipment, and a jeep. The storm that had made the D-day passage so horrendous had long passed, but the channel waters were still rough, and clambering down a net from a transport ship into the landing craft with three cameras and her rucksack had taken all her agility. But now she was within minutes of landing and without the pleasure of strafing planes or land batteries trying to kill her.

  Bracing herself against the wall of the craft, she took a few shots of the harbor, sprung up as if by miracle within two days of the first wave of attack. Then she was in the icy water up to her knees, and holding her rucksack and equipment over her head, she splashed toward the shore.

  “Over here!” A GI waved them over to a path to higher ground where a covered truck stood. Alex and the Wacs climbed on and braced themselves on their benches as the truck rocked and bumped over the rutted road.

  They passed troops marching eastward on the road, and as soon as the GIs spotted the women, the wolf whistles began. Annoying, of course, but Alex decided that marching into the battlefield entitled them to that degree of misbehavior.

  After an hour or so, the truck stopped and an MP helped them onto the ground. “Welcome to the Communication Zone, ladies,” he said, and Alex surveyed the field covered with tents, washing facilities, and what seemed to be covered latrines. “You’ll be staying here until you’re assigned,” he added, and led them in batches of six to their respective group tents.

  Alex unpacked and laid out her bedroll. She was also relieved to be able to take off her trousers, still wet to the knees, and hang them on the tent pole to dry.

  “Swell idea,” a handsome, statuesque Wac on the bunk next to her said, and also slid off her wet fatigues. “I was wondering what to do with these.” She held up her own trousers and hung them alongside Alex’s.

  As both stood there in their general-issue cotton underwear, the other woman held out her hand. “Jo Knightly.”

  Alex smiled and took it. “Alex Preston. I wonder how long we’ll be here.”

  “Don’t know about you, but we’re waiting to be assigned to Supreme Allied Headquarters. I’m General Eisenhower’s secretary and the others are in communication.” She reached for a brush and ran it through her short hair, forming it into a modified ducktail.

  “Honored to meet you. Where will you be located?”

  “We don’t know yet, frankly. Those crates that came with us are full of telephone and wireless equipment for his first command post. We’re just waiting for orders telling us where to go. What about you?”

  “I’m waiting to be attached to the Third Army.”

  “They’ve assigned you to Patton? Condolences, hon. Patton’s not much of a lady’s man.”

  A woman just across from them laughed. “From what I hear, he’s not much of a man’s man either. He slapped two shell-shocked GIs in an evacuation hospital and called them cowards.”

  “Really?” Alex wrapped her blanket around her waist like a sarong and sat on her bunk. “He’d be right at home with Stalin, who has no interest in his men once they’re out of battle. Though Stalin doesn’t so much slap them as have them shot.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Jo asked.

  “From Stalin himself, on Moscow radio.”

  “Gosh, you speak Russian? And you’ve been in Moscow?” Jo said. “And here I thought I was a big shot for getting to France. What was it like?”

  Alex winced. She was always getting the same questions, and they always ended up with the same clichés. She took a breath. “Cold. Dangerous. Desperate.”

  “Did you see battle?” The question came from a large-eyed woman who couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

  “Yes, I did.” She saw no reason to go into detail.

  “Oh, my. Were you in foxholes with the troops? That sort of thing?”

  “No. With the Soviet Air Force. A woman’s regiment, in fact. Night bombers and fighter pilots.” Here we go again, she thought.

  A circle of young women had gathered around her now. “Wow. Women in air battles? Incredible.”

  Jo leaned sideways on her bunk, resting on one elbow. “Did you fly with them? How thrilling, but it must have been kind of humbling, too.”

  Alex turned and faced her. “Yes, it was. Not just the flying, but the work of the ground crews, who were also women. The duty was grueling. It pushed them really to the limit of their strength, and they never had enough food or warm places to sleep. Even in winter.”

  “What were they like as people? Like us?” another one asked.

  “All different, of course, and in some ways like us, but ferocious fighters.” She looked into the middle distance, recalling faces.

  “And you could talk to them, too. How wonderful,” Jo said with sincere admiration. “Did you have close friends? Someone special?” The question could have meant anything.

  “Several of them were special. Marina Raskova, Raisa Beliaeva, Katia Budanova. But they were all killed.” Saying their names caused a pang of sorrow but also seemed to honor them. She wanted not to forget them.

  “And…Lilya Drachenko,” she added. “Shot down in the Ukraine. A prisoner of war, I think. Waiting for someone to liberate her.” She fell silent.

  “Such wonderful romantic names,” the young one chirped.

  Jo stared at Alex, and her expression showed she understood all of it. “Is that why you’re going back?” she asked softly. “To be the one?”

  “Yes,” Alex said. “At whatever cost.”

  Jo nodded and said, almost inaudibly, “It’s a precious thing, that kind of love.”

  “All right, ladies. Lights out!” the officer in charge called from outside their tent.

  “Yes, sir!” The woman nearest the lantern switched it off, and everyone took to her bunk.

  Jo’s voice came from her bunk close by. “A shame we’re going in different directions. It would have been swell to pal around with you.”

  “Appreciate the compliment, Jo. I think you’d be a good comrade, too. But you know, I was on the Eastern Front so long, I think I for
got how to ‘pal around’ with anyone.”

  Jo chortled softly. “And you were there so long you started using the word comrade. Anyhow, listen, hon. Anything you need from Allied Headquarters, you let me know.”

  “Thanks, Jo. I’ll keep that in mind.” Alex lay back on her cot and closed her eyes, trying, as she did every night, to remember the details of Lilya Drachenko’s face.

  *

  The Wacs were deployed to temporary Allied headquarters two days later. Suddenly alone, Alex moped a little, snapping the odd photo here and there. And on August 1, she received orders to meet the Third Army at Muneville-le-Bingard, where it was beginning its French campaign. She caught a ride with auxiliary troops south to Rennes, then followed Patton’s army as it swept north and eastward.

  The battles were hard-fought, but city after city fell. Soon she could see a certain monotony in her photographs: the same ruined buildings and bloated bodies of livestock, the same dead soldiers of both armies. Like in Russia, but without the snow to freeze them and cover the odor.

  At the end of August, while she stood with a few GIs overlooking the Seine River at Montereau, news came of the liberation of Paris. She regretted, briefly, that she’d missed the chance to get momentous photos but was certain Robert Capa had gotten them, and she didn’t begrudge him the glory.

  Buck up, old girl, she thought. Stay on the program. You still have half of Europe to cross.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Summer 1944, Belorussia

  Hunkered down in a building outside Minsk, Lilya glanced up as the post courier came in. “Good news, comrade,” he said, tossing her a copy of Red Star.

  She scanned the headline and lead article. “The Anglo armies have landed in France,” she said with quiet awe. “Finally we have a second front.”

  “Took them long enough,” the courier said, moving on to the next building.

  She had no idea what the beaches of France looked like, but she tried to imagine them covered with Allied soldiers. What a photo opportunity that must have been. Alex would have loved it if she hadn’t been so far away in Moscow.

  Was she still in Moscow? Lilya realized she had no idea, and the thought that Alex might have left Russia filled her with a deep sorrow.

  Just then, a call from their leader brought the detachment to its feet, and she had to quit brooding. A constant regime of battle and marching for weeks at a time without leave—and she was never granted leave—was mind-numbing, but the camaraderie of the battlefield had become her entire world.

  The summer months wore on, and while the army still made two steps forward and one step back, Hitler was now retreating on all fronts. Sustained by the constant arrival of good news, she fought patriotically, kilometer after kilometer, loyal to Russia and to her comrades, if not to the Kremlin and the party.

  Soon the victories began to pile up. Paris liberated in August, Lithuania fallen in September, and 57,000 German POWs had been paraded through Moscow. Was Alex there, capturing the scene for her magazine?

  But in September, as she waited for orders near the Polish border, that loyalty began to weaken. Word filtered back about the uprising against the Germans in Warsaw, and the obvious course of action was to go to their aid. But to her amazement, orders came from the NKVD that the Red Army was to stand down and let the uprising succeed or fail on its own.

  She dared to confide only in Olga. “How could they do that? Aren’t we both fighting the Germans?”

  Olga shrugged. “It’s not for us to judge. We don’t know what the generals are planning. They’re the leaders and we’re pledged to follow.”

  “I suppose you’re right, but I thought the Free Polish Army was our ally, and now we’re abandoning them. What if our allies in the West did that to us?”

  “For God’s sake, be quiet!” Olga hissed. “If the commissar heard you, you’d be arrested. Just do your job and keep your doubts to yourself.”

  Lilya fell silent. Doubts were exactly what plagued her. And when the uprising in Poland was crushed, her youthful faith in the party and the military authorities began to crumble.

  She almost feared the days when they were allowed to rest. When she tried to sleep, her mind buzzed with questions. A voice at the back of her mind kept saying that a victory for Russia would be a victory for Stalin and that the very government she feared would be stronger than ever. Was she losing her wits, falling prey to the very thoughts that made her own father an enemy of the people?

  She’d grown up thinking “the state” had a complete claim on her. But somehow, being captured and then disavowed, then living among the troops rather than her Komsomol comrades, had given the word “state” a different flavor. A small, hard idea had formed inside of her like a disease, that the state had betrayed her. Now only her comrades, the millions of her brothers and sisters in the Red Army, claimed her fidelity. Men, at least, were good, even if their government was cruel.

  Then they arrived in East Prussia and one day, two of the young lads came back from a farmhouse the forward troops had confiscated, both rather full of themselves. They swaggered and smirked at one another, as if they had some amusing secret.

  As she attempted to pass them, they warned her to stay away from the farmhouse but wouldn’t say why. She ignored them and continued on. Maybe they’d found extra food and were hiding it for themselves. She didn’t like being excluded.

  Once inside the farmhouse, she heard drunken laughter coming from one of the rooms.

  The door was ajar, and when she peered inside, she saw them. A dozen of her comrades formed a circle around something happening at the center on the floor. Only when two of the men lurched sideways, giving her a full view, did she make sense of it.

  A woman lay there, moaning and thrashing, though Lilya could see only her bare legs, held apart by two soldiers while a third pumped into her.

  One of the onlookers spotted her and slammed the door shut, but now she understood. That is what they were doing when they went off in groups of four and five into the houses of the defeated Germans. Revolted, she fled back to the camp where the first lad stood, rolling machorka tobacco into a scrap of paper.

  “Calm down,” he said. “She’s a German. It’s what they did to our women when they invaded. We’re just paying them back.”

  “So, that’s how you punish them, by torturing their women for your own pleasure? What if they recapture this sector and do the same to me? You make me sick. All of you. Your mothers would be ashamed.”

  She stomped away, filled with revulsion. These were men she had called her brothers? The war had turned them into beasts, and the only thing that protected her from the same atrocity was that she traveled with the victors.

  At that moment, her last loyalty was destroyed, and she fought on toward Berlin because she had to, in the midst of an army of men she could no longer trust.

  What was she going to do on the day of victory?

  The question was driving her mad.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  All in all, August had gone well, Alex thought. The Third Army had battled its way back and forth through Brittany and central France, then began its march toward the Rhine. Its commander, George Patton, was used to winning battles, and if photographers were there to document his successes as a tough-guy general, that was just fine.

  Alex stayed out of his way, dutifully photographing the victories at Verdun, Nancy, Metz, but in December the retreating Germans suddenly counterattacked, and Patton had to lead his troops back into the Ardennes.

  Through snow as thick as any she remembered in Russia, he drove his tanks and marched his infantrymen into Bastogne. The ferocity of the fight took everyone but her by surprise, but by the end of January, the Allies had won.

  Finally, in early March, they came to Remagen, where the bridge over the Rhine River had just been lost. Undaunted, the Third Army Engineers transported their men and material, first by raft and ferry, and then by a steel treadway bridge built on pontoons. Alex liked watc
hing the men build things. So much nicer than blasting them apart.

  Patton was an enigma. His list of victories was impressive, but Alex couldn’t determine whether they were because of, or in spite of, his style. She compared his swagger and snarl with the measured orders of Eva Bershanskaya. Of course, Bershanskaya commanded women, who didn’t need to be verbally assailed to obey. But maybe men didn’t either.

  But whatever the strategies of the Allied armies through the winter of 1944-45, they were winning, and by March it was obvious that the end was in sight. She took her best photograph in March while she rode the back of a Third Army tank rumbling down the autobahn. Asking the driver to halt for a moment, she leapt onto an embankment to gain some height. She directed her camera downward and recorded the thousands of captured Wehrmacht soldiers trudging westward to POW camps on one side of the highway, while on the other, the Allied tanks and jeeps rolled eastward into the heart of the Reich.

  Germans this time. On the Eastern Front, it had been Soviets. Masses of people marching together in victory or defeat seemed to be one of the symbols of war.

  At sunset, Patton called the march to a halt, and in the spring weather, his men bivouacked on the ground without complaint. Alex, too, was happy to set up her little pup tent for a night’s rest. As she was loosening the laces on her boots, the tent flap opened.

  “Hey!” She glanced up, annoyed that someone would enter without permission, but her anger evaporated immediately. “Robert Capa, what are you doing slumming with the Third Army? I thought you’d still be on the Champs Elysees.”

  “Nope. Paris is passé these days. Germany’s where the action is. Anyhow, come on, and bring your mess kit. Patton scored a case of wine from one of the villages. He’s invited the press for a drink.”

  “Sure thing.” She snatched up her mess tin and followed him to the general’s tent.