In Europe

by Geert Mak

  Within two weeks the Soviets had launched their first counterattack. They landed on the German side of the Volga, drove the enemy away from the railway station there, suffered enormous losses, but held their positions in the centre of town. In the neighbouring tractor plant, which had been converted for the production of T-34s, volunteers climbed into the turrets even before the paint was dry. They drove straight off the production line into battle. The Red Star army gazette published a poem by Ilya Ehrenburg, written for the occasion:

  Do not count the days, do not count the metres

  Count only the Germans you have killed.

  Kill the German: that is your mother's plea.

  Kill the German: thus cries your Russian earth.

  Do not hesitate.

  Do not let up.

  Kill!

  Stalingrad – Volgograd since 1961 – stretches out like a Dutch peat-mining village; equally boring, but many times bigger. It is a typical, elongated, riverside town, a narrow strip of buildings along the waterfront, only a few streets deep but almost a hundred kilometres long, an endless row of apartment districts, factories, power plants, dullness piled upon dullness. On all sides of that strip, stretching far into the horizon, is the steppe, a hot dusty plain reminiscent of Texas or Arizona: huge fields of grain, an occasional tree, telephone wires, a few barns, an unlatched door banging in the wind. Every once in a while a group of colossal bulldozers and excavators will loom up, working on a new road, digging a new irrigation canal. The mentality is that of Las Vegas: build it up, break it down and get out.

  I take a ride on the municipal railway, examine the frown of the woman whose job it is to mark each and every ticket by hand – the stamping machine has not yet reached Volgograd – and walk around the streets and through the parks. Particularly noteworthy is the bearing of its young people: nowhere else in the former Eastern Bloc have I seen so much home-made elegance, so many women in such conspicuously beautiful apparel. Creations that would catch the eye in Paris, London or Milan pass by on the street here every couple of minutes.

  Later that evening in my quiet, sedate Intourist hotel, an underground existence begins, most of which eludes me. The lobby fills with girls in their Sunday best, and the phone beside my bed rings no less than three times: ‘You need girl?’ When I say no for the last time – I was just dreaming of Katyushas and tank manoeuvres – the voice says in surprise ‘Why not?’, as though I were suffering from some disease.

  An old woman is standing near the station. She is wearing sturdy boots, heavy stockings, a dark-grey skirt and knitted vest. Her grey head is a little bowed, she covers it with a brown cloth, her skin is red, her teeth almost gone. Once – in 1955 perhaps, or in 1942 – she must have been pretty, very pretty in fact, you can tell by her eyes. Now she's been standing here all afternoon. She's trying to sell five bunches of onions and two bottles of Fanta.

  That winter in Stalingrad she may have been a nurse, or one of those spirited girls at the anti-aircraft guns, or one of the few thousand mothers with children who, hidden away in cellars and shafts, lived through the whole struggle from beginning to end.

  The fighting in the city soon had nothing more to do with matters of strategy or the art of warfare. It was, as the Germans put it, a Rattenkrieg. The Soviets fought with commando groups of six to eight men, armed with sub-machine guns, but also with knives or sharpened spades, all the better to kill without a sound. At one point, in a huge brick warehouse on the Volga, there were both Russians and Germans, a different foe on each floor, piled up on top of each other like a wedding cake. The Russians stacked frozen corpses around their foxholes to serve as sandbags. Commandos from both armies fought each other in the sewers with flame-throwers. At night, Soviet soldiers in white camouflage suits crept outside to lay antitank mines. They were very successful at it, even though their losses were the highest among all the specialists. Their motto was: ‘One mistake, and you'll never eat with your hands again!’

  Without their realising it, Stalingrad had served as a gigantic piece of bait for the Germans. The most important task of the Soviet troops was defending the city and, at the same time, engaging the Germans and keeping them from moving on. Meanwhile, in deepest secrecy, a Soviet force of almost a million men was being assembled to free Stalingrad.

  After almost three months, on the icy, misty morning of Thursday, 19 November, 1942, Commander Alexander Vasilevsky sprung the trap. The first bombardments and artillery salvoes were so intense that German troops forty-five kilometres away were wakened by what seemed to be an earthquake. Amid the pounding, the citizens in their shelters in Stalingrad that morning heard a new sound, a strange whining. Suddenly they knew, these were the Stalin Organs, these were their own troops’ Katyushas. Their liberation had begun.

  From that day on Stalingrand was surrounded by a twin siege: the Germans held the city itself in their grip, while the Soviets banded together around them. After a while the stretch of steppe between the two armies was full of dead horses and infantrymen frozen black, and when the front was quiet for a moment, tango music would come blaring across the shadowy expanse of snow: the Soviets had discovered that this music was what made the Germans most melancholy.

  At first the Soviets had no idea how many Germans were at their mercy. The staff thought it was about ten divisions, a little under 90,000 men. It turned out to be almost the entire 6th Army, plus several tens of thousands of Italians and Rumanians: some 300,000 men in all. The area around the city was like Verdun all over again. With one difference: this battle would not end in a draw.

  In this same flat countryside, now green and yellow with summer, a few scars of the battle can still be seen from the air: shell craters, trenches, the remains of old barricades. A taxi driver takes me across the dusty steppe to a little monument. I recognise the outlines of a trench. ‘At least 10,000 men were killed here,’ the driver says, pointing to the surrounding fields full of rape and cornflowers. ‘They're still here, in the ground. We never had money for neat war cemeteries.’

  The memorial is a plain one, it lacks the stateliness of all those parks and statues in the city, it is a monument erected by wives and mothers. In the middle of it is a scorched, dead tree that somehow remained upright amid the battle. It is hung with handkerchiefs and rags, like a spirit tree in the Orient. Every year the fields here still spew forth grenades and gun barrels, bullets and buckles, skulls and bones.

  In the display cases of the Historical Museum in Volgograd one finds a small selection of the personal belongings found on German corpses: wedding rings, a fountain pen, a watch, a tiny saint's figure, a few letters. ‘Yesterday again, as so often, a comrade blown to pieces by a direct hit,’ Bertold D. wrote to Frau Elisabeth Sturm in Worms on 24 December, 1942.‘Now we are sitting together, celebrating Christmas Eve in Stalingrad, while the Russians outside continue to shoot wildly. We sing Christmas songs, accompanied by a comrade on the accordion. Then everyone goes to his corner and thinks of home.’ Konrad Konsuk wrote: ‘My darling, don't fear for me. I am doing well. This evening we were given a hundred grams of bread and a quarter-litre of marmalade.’ An unknown soldier: ‘I desperately wish you were with me. How badly only you, my dearest, as the only one in the world, can know.’

  Very interesting is the difference in tone of the Russian letters collected by the British military historian Antony Beevor.

  ‘Hello my dear Pavlina,’ a soldier wrote to his wife, ‘I am still alive and in good health … The war is hard. Every soldier has a simple task: to destroy as many Krauts as possible, and to drive the rest back to the West.’ A lieutenant: ‘Hello, Shura! I send kisses to our two little ones, Slavik and Lidusya. I am in good health. I was wounded twice, but they are only scratches and so I can still aim my cannon well … In these days of heavy fighting I avenge my beloved city of Smensk, but at night I sit in the cellar with two blond children on my lap. They remind me of Slavik and Lida.’ It was the last letter he wrote.

  The city outside bea
rs almost no trace of the war, except for the two ruins that have been left standing deliberately. The House of Pavlov is a plain, four-storey building where a little group of Soviet soldiers, led by Sergeant Yakov Pavlov, held up under siege for almost two months. It is now little more than a well maintained state monument. The only other real memorial is a little further on: the remains of an enormous mill, full of breaches and bullet holes, still the way it was in summer 1943, empty and desolate amid the tall grass.

  ‘Hello, Mariya,’ soldier Kolya wrote. ‘I have been fighting here for three months to defend our lovely [deleted by censor] … Only the most stubborn SSers remain. They have withdrawn into bunkers and are shooting from there. And now I am going to blow up one of those bunkers. Greetings, Kolya.’

  On the morning of Sunday, 10 January, the last great Soviet attack began: Operation Koltso (Ring). For almost a full hour the German lines were pounded by some 7,000 field cannons, mortars and Katyushas. Then the Red Army closed ranks and advanced, the red banners out in front, a T-34 tank every fifty to a hundred metres. The German divisions did not have a chance. Their ammunition and fuel were sorely depleted, the soldiers could hardly stand upright. Until the very last moment, wounded men at Pitomnik airfield were trying to fight their way on board one of the planes leaving for Germany. Overloaded Junkers, sometimes too heavy to gain enough altitude, were fired on by the Soviets and crashed. An enormous Focke-Wulf Kondor, filled to the gunnels with wounded men, took off too slowly, flipped onto its back and exploded on the ground.

  Hundreds of wounded men were left to their fate in the snow. One survivor spoke later of ‘an endless wailing of the wounded and dying’.

  Paulus surrendered on 31 January, 1943. The agitprop newsreel cameras recorded the whole thing. The emaciated German soldiers came stumbling out of Stalingrad's cellars and bunkers. The occasional Russian shouted ‘Kameraden, Krieg kaput!’, but most of them only shouted ‘Faschist! Komm! Komm!’ Then the Germans were led off in long, tattered columns.

  So came the end for all those enthusiastic soldiers who, in that warm, distant August less than five months earlier, had travelled across the steppes, eaten helmetfuls of pears and stolen honey by the spoonful. Along with Paulus, close to 90,000 Germans were taken prisoner. By the time spring came almost half of them had died of starvation and hardship. Some 180,000 German soldiers remained missing. Of the 300,000 men in the 6th Army, a little under 6,000 went home at last.

  The Second World War cost the lives of 8–9 million soldiers in the Red Army, and left 18 million wounded. In addition, it has been estimated that between 16–19 million Soviet citizens lost their lives during the war. Estimates of the total number of Soviet casualties hover around 25 million, five times that of the Germans.

  The Soviet Union's victory was due largely to the prowess of field marshals Zhukhov, Timoshenko and Vasilevsky, General Alexei Antonov and a number of other outstanding military leaders. Stalin had enormous charisma, he was able to whip up the entire Soviet Union to incredible achievements and sacrifices, he was intelligent and in the end he developed a good sense of military strategy. But he remained, in the words of Volkogonov, ‘an armchair general: he was practical, vicious and persevering by nature’, someone who had ‘fathomed the secrets of war at the cost of bloody experimentation’.

  In the face of adversity, and rather than revise his strategy, Stalin was sometimes unable to come up with any better plan than to mete out punishment. Infamous is Order Number 227 issued by Stalin on 28 July, 1942, under the title ‘No Step Backwards’. From that moment on, anyone who surrendered was to be considered a ‘traitor to the homeland’. In order ‘to combat cowardice’, every army was to organise three to five well-armed detachments which would move along as a second front behind the first wave of attack, and shoot down any soldier who hesitated. ‘Cowards and those who sow panic are to be destroyed on the spot.’

  ‘How many matches were burned?’ some Soviet commanders would ask after a battle, when they wanted to know about their own losses. Or: ‘How many pencils were broken?’ For that is a forgotten element of the Russian triumphs: the huge toll in human lives paid by the Soviets for Stalin's ‘brilliant strategy’.

  As noted, the situation at Nazi headquarters was not so very different. Although the two leaders differed in character, Hitler too was a dilettante who had come to believe in his own mythical power. Indeed, Speer singled out dilettantism as the essence of Hitler's military leadership: ‘He had never learned a profession, and had essentially always remained an outsider. Like many autodidacts, he could not judge the real significance of professional expertise. With no understanding of the complex difficulties of every great assignment, he therefore insatiably took on more and more new functions.’

  During his first years in power Hitler's dilettantism worked very effectively in Germany, probably because the country and its military had always been run rigidly and bureaucratically. According to Speer, Hitler's earlier economic and military successes were attributable to his lack of knowledge of the old, fixed rules, and to the reckless energy of a layman who scarcely realises the risks he is taking.

  As soon as any significant adversity arose, Hitler was in a quandary. When the German Army ‘failed’ before Moscow in December 1941, he could come up with nothing better than to place the entire Wehrmacht under his personal supervision. Like Stalin he was bound and determined to make all important decisions himself, and would on occasion suddenly meddle in the most trifling details of a military operation. But where Stalin let himself be protected by a number of excellent generals and staff officers, Hitler refused to delegate a thing.

  Stalin was willing to be convinced. Hitler, due to his own war experience and his subsequent successes, was convinced that he was a second Napoleon. In Speer's words:‘The greater the failures, the more pronounced and grim his ineluctable dilettantism became. The penchant for unexpected and surprising moves had long been his strength; now it hastened his demise.’

  Chapter THIRTY-SEVEN

  Odessa

  WHEN I ARRIVE IN KIEV, THE WHOLE CITY IS CELEBRATING. STARTING at the station is a long string of loudspeakers, all singing the same thing. Freely translated: ‘When the chestnuts blossom in Kiev, my heart will open to you.’ Everyone has the day off, there is to be a race for soldiers, and dozens of veterans, seventy-five, eighty years old, their chests hung with ribbons and medals, proud of their uniforms, are walking around with their wives, most of them with a row of medals pinned to their blouses as well.

  This is the generation that won the war, that survived Stalin, that rebuilt a flattened Kiev. And these are the same people who must survive today on a pension of twenty euros a months.

  Most of the older people don't understand the society in which they suddenly find themselves, and do not want to understand. They are like passengers who get off the train a few stops too late, look about in surprise, and decide that this is not where they want to be. Close to the war memorial – a hundred-metre-tall woman nicknamed ‘The Bitch’ – an old colonel with a megaphone spews his rage all over the crowd: ‘No one pays any attention to the working people any more!’ he shouts. ‘This country is full of bandits and robbers! Shame on this government! We have only one mother country: the good old Soviet Union! The Ukraine is only our stepmother! We are being exploited by bandits! The Germans have invaded the country again with their money and their decadence! We have been sold out!’ There are ten people standing around him.

  My interpreter calmly translates the man's tirade. Her name is IrinaTrantina, a brisk fifty-year-old, daughter of a Soviet general. She doesn't find it too hard to imagine the old veterans’ rage. ‘This is the generation that built modern Kiev up from the rubble the Germans had left behind. They worked their fingers to the bone all their lives, and now the Germans come back here, as tourists and investors, rich and powerful, while they …’

  I had visited Kiev in 1997, and I tell Irina that I can see that the inner city has been fixed up a lot in the l
ast two years. Many of the houses have their old colour back, soft yellow and blue pastels, and the domes of the churches and cloisters sparkle in the sun again. All thanks to the dollars, guilders and Deutschmarks.

  ‘But that's only the centre of town. All those Western banks, all the advertising you see, it's not anything substantial, it remains on the surface of the economy. What goes on beneath – the corruption, the salaries that can't be paid for months at a time, the official ninety per cent tax on profits that makes all legitimate business activities impossible – those are the things that actually determine the way we live. What you Westerners see is a shop window. Our country is just like a family: the real problems are never aired outside the home.’

  And what about freedom, the new freedom?

  Irina laughs. ‘We used to be afraid to talk, but we talked anyway. And things happened. Now we can talk as much as we like, but we never see any results.’ She tells me about her mother, the general's widow. She died not too long ago, at the age of ninety-five. Just before she died, she asked Irina to buy her a kilo of candy, the kind she always kept in the house. ‘Wouldn't it be better to start with a hundred grams?’ her daughter asked. ‘A kilo of candy, that costs more than half your monthly pension.’ ‘You're trying to trick me!’ her mother had shouted. She died in total confusion.

  Irina and I head out to the Women's Ravine. It lies at the foot of Kiev's broadcasting centre. I had imagined it in many different ways, but not that it would it be a pleasant, normal park in which to take a walk. Families are picnicking there, young mothers are teaching their children to walk. Beside the park is a ravine more than two kilometres long and fifty metres deep. In that ravine, which the Russians call Babi Yar, something close to 100,000 people were murdered: Jews, Gypsies, partisans, prisoners of war, up to and including the entire staff of the Nova Ukrainski Slovo daily. The Germans later dug up most of the bodies and burned them, but the park workers here still regularly stumble upon bones, almost every time they plant a shrub. Sometimes the skeletons are bound together with barbed wire, which is how some of the victims were forced to march to the place of execution.