A Writer at War

by Vasily Grossman

  Abganerovo station is full of captured materiel. The Germans had already managed to alter the railway track.2 There are French and Belgian freight carriages here, and Polish ones, too. There are whole trains loaded with flour, corn, mines, shells, fat in big square tins, freight cars full of ersatz valenki with thick wooden soles, sheepskin hats, equipment, searchlights. Our medical teplushkas look pitiful and destitute with their hastily made bunk beds covered with dirty rags. Soldiers grunt as they carry paper sacks of flour out of the freight cars and load them on to trucks. A [Nazi] eagle is printed boldly on each sack.

  The faces of Red Army soldiers have become bronze red from the severe winter winds. It isn’t easy to fight in this kind of weather, to spend long winter nights out in the steppe under this icy wind that penetrates everywhere, yet the men are marching cheerfully. This is the Stalingrad advance. The army is in exceptionally high spirits.

  By 26 November, over a quarter of a million men from Paulus’s Sixth Army, the largest formation in the Wehrmacht, had been surrounded between the Volga and the Don. The Red Army, underestimating the size of the force it had surrounded, immediately launched a series of attacks to smash the perimeter, but the Germans, believing that Hitler would never abandon them, resisted fiercely.

  A happy, bright day. Preliminary bombardment. Katyushas. Ivan the Terrible. Roaring. Smoke. And failure. The Germans have dug themselves in, we couldn’t hunt them out.

  Grossman reads a newspaper, perhaps checking one of his own articles in Krasnaya Zvezda. The camel in the background may be the famous Kuznechik who accompanied the 308th Rifle Division all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin.

  The weather became increasingly harsh, with snow and hard frosts, which reduced the chances of the Sixth Army being able to fight its way out. The Red Army was far more used to such conditions.

  At the front line out in the steppe, winter. A hole covered with a groundsheet. A stove made from a helmet. A chimney from a brass shell. The fuel [consists of] tall weeds. On the march, one soldier carries an armful of tall weeds, another one a handful of chips, the third one a shell, the fourth one the stove.

  At the beginning of December, Grossman returned to the east bank opposite Stalingrad. He wrote to the editor of Krasnaya Zvezda.

  Comrade Ortenberg, I am planning to leave for the city tomorrow. I had wanted to start a big essay,3 but I realise that I have to postpone writing and spend some time collecting material in the city. As the crossing is complicated now,4 my trip is going to take at least a week. This is why you should not be angry if there is a delay in sending you my work. In the city, my plan is to have conversations with Chuikov and divisional commanders and to visit the front units. Also I would like to inform you that I will need to visit Moscow, approximately in January. I would be very grateful, if you could summon me back. In fact, I feel somewhat overloaded with impressions and overexhausted after the three months of tension in Stalingrad. If something unfortunate and unexpected happens during my visit to the city, could you please help my family? Vasily Grossman.

  Grossman managed to get across and went to 62nd Army headquarters. Life was much quieter, since the now besieged Germans were short of ammunition as well as food. Their survival depended entirely on resupply by air to Pitomnik airfield, in the centre of the encircled area. Goering had told Hitler it was perfectly possible to resupply the Sixth Army by air, even though his own Luftwaffe generals had warned him that such a huge task was impossible. The soldiers of the Sixth Army were encouraged to hold out with vain stories of an SS panzer army coming to their aid. General Chuikov told Grossman: ‘There was a rumour among Germans that Hitler himself had visited Pitomnik and that he had said: “Stand firm! I am leading an army to rescue you.” (He was dressed as a corporal).’

  This battlefield legend bore a resemblance to the equally untrue story on the Soviet side during the desperate September days that Stalin himself had been seen in Stalingrad.

  Chuikov also outlined the situation his own 62nd Army faced due to virtual impossibility of resupply across the half-frozen Volga. They had to rely almost entirely on radio communications with the east bank, because all the land-lines had been snapped by the ice. Their one great advantage, however, remained the artillery positions concentrated on the west bank. Their resupply of ammunition was not affected.

  Grossman described Chuikov’s bunker in an article entitled ‘Military Council’.

  When one enters a bunker and the underground quarters of officers and soldiers, one feels again an ardent wish to retain for ever in one’s memory the remarkable traits of this unique life. The lamps and the chimney made from artillery shell cases, cups made of brass shell bases standing on tables near crystal glasses. Next to an anti-tank grenade sits a china ashtray on which is written ‘Wife, don’t make your husband angry’. There is a huge dull electric bulb in the commander-in-chief’s bunker, and a smile from Chuikov, who says: ‘Yes, and a chandelier. Aren’t we living in a city?’ And this volume of Shakespeare in General Gurov’s underground office . . . All these samovars and gramophones, blue family sugar bowls and round mirrors in wooden frames on the clay walls of basements. All this everyday life, with peaceful household things rescued from the burning buildings.

  Grossman, although fiercely satisfied by the inevitable victory over the Sixth Army, became increasingly depressed by the way his work was rewritten in the editorial offices of Krasnaya Zvezda and wrote about it to his wife on 5 December.

  I work a lot. You can probably see that from the newspaper. If you saw how they cut and distort [my writing], and not only that, they also add new phrases to my poor pieces, you would probably be more upset than happy about the fact that my writing sees the light at all. The editorial office has adopted a rule of cutting off the end of any essay, replacing dots with commas, crossing out the descriptions that I particularly like, changing titles and inserting phrases like: ‘This faith and love virtually made miracles.’ This editing is done in haste by professional editors, and sometimes I have to read a phrase several times to understand its meaning. All this upsets me very much because I am working in very difficult conditions . . .

  Chuikov’s 62nd Army remained on short rations – including makhorka and vodka – during the slow freezing of the Volga. Finally, on 16 December, the river froze solid. First, a footbridge across the ice was made with planks. Then, a proper route across the river could be laid, with branches and twigs doused in water to strengthen the surface. This meant that it could soon take trucks and even heavy artillery. ‘Good frosts!’ Red Army soldiers wrote home in satisfaction. In less than two months, 18,000 trucks and 17,000 other vehicles are said to have driven across the ice. Grossman celebrated this development in an article entitled ‘The New Day’.

  All those who, for a hundred days, held on to the Volga crossing and crossed the dark grey icy river, looked into the eyes of a quick, pitiless death. One day someone will sing a song about those who are now asleep on the Volga’s bed . . .

  At night, we could walk upon the Volga. The ice was two days old and did not bend any longer beneath our feet. The moon lit the network of paths, uncountable tracks of sledges. A liaison soldier was walking in front of us, quickly and confidently as if he’d spent half of his life walking on these intermingling paths. Suddenly the ice started cracking. The liaison soldier came to a wide ice clearing, stopped and said: ‘Aha! We must have taken the wrong path. We should have stayed to the right.’ Liaison men always utter this sort of consoling phrase, no matter where they take you.

  Barges smashed by shells have frozen into the ice. There’s a bluish glistening of ice-covered hawsers. Sterns rise steeply up, so do the bows of sunken motor boats.

  Fighting is still going on in the factories . . . Guns fire with hollow bangs, rumblings, and the explosions of shells resound drily and clearly. Often, bursts of machine-gun and sub-machine-gun fire can be heard distinctly. This music is fearfully similar to the peaceful work of the plant, like riveting or steam hammers beatin
g steel bars, and flattening them. It is as if liquid steel and slag pouring into a mould are lighting the fresh ice on the Volga with a pink, quick glow.

  The sun rises and illuminates the edges of large holes made by heavy bombs. The depths of these frightening holes are always in a gloomy penumbra. The sun is afraid to touch them . . .

  The sun shines over hundreds of railway tracks where tanker wagons are lying like killed horses, with their bellies torn open; where hundreds of freight carriages are jammed one on top of another, blasted there by the force of an explosion, and crowded around cold locomotives like a panic-stricken herd huddling around its leaders.

  We are walking on a wasteland covered with holes from bombs and shells – German snipers and lookouts can see the place well, but the skinny Red Army soldier in a long trenchcoat is walking by my side calmly and without haste. He explains soothingly: ‘You wonder whether he can’t see us? Well, he can. We used to crawl here at night, but now it is different: he is saving rounds and shells.’

  Past a heap of rust-coloured metal rubbish, past the colossal steel-pouring ladles, past steel plates and broken walls. Red Army soldiers are so used to destruction here that they fail to notice all this. On the contrary, an item of interest here is an intact glass in a window of the destroyed factory office, a tall chimney, or a wooden house that has miraculously survived. ‘Please look. That house is still alive,’ passers-by say, smiling.

  Not surprisingly, Grossman was suffering from severe strain by mid-December, when he wrote again to his father.

  I think I will be in Moscow in January. I am well, but my nerves have suffered a lot. I’ve become angry and irritable, I keep attacking my colleagues. They are frightened of me now. I cannot leave this place right away and I don’t want to. You see, now that fortune has turned in our direction, one does not want to leave the place where one had seen the hardest possible moments.

  As his departure from Stalingrad approached, Grossman became increasingly preoccupied with his experiences there.

  Red Army soldiers wound the gramophone up. ‘What record shall we put on?’ one of them asked. Several voices spoke up at once. ‘Our one. That one.’

  Then a strange thing happened. While the soldier was looking for the record, I thought: It would be so wonderful to hear my favourite song in this black, destroyed basement. And suddenly, a solemn, melancholy voice began to sing: ‘A snowstorm is howling outside the windows . . .’ The Red Army soldiers must have liked this song very much. Everyone sat in silence. We must have heard the same refrain of the song a dozen of times:

  ‘My Lady Death, we beg you,

  Please wait outside.’

  These words and Beethoven’s immortal music sounded indescribably powerful here. For me, this was probably one of the most emotional moments in the whole war . . . And I remembered a little letter written in a child’s hand, which was found by a dead soldier in a strongpoint. ‘Good afternoon, or maybe good evening. Hello, Tyatya [Daddy] . . .’ And I remembered this dead Tyatya, who was probably reading the letter when he was dying, and the crumpled sheet lay by his head.

  1 Marshal Ion Antonescu (1882–1946), the Romanian dictator, had been Germany’s staunchest supporter in the invasion of the Soviet Union, but the collapse of his ill-equipped forces in the Stalingrad campaign produced intense German resentment against their unfortunate ally.

  2 The Russian gauge railway track was different to that of Western Europe.

  3 Grossman is almost certainly referring to ‘Stalingrad Army’.

  4 The Volga had still not frozen solid, so crossing the river was extremely dangerous and unpredictable.

  PART THREE

  Recovering the

  Occupied Territories

  1943

  EIGHTEEN

  After the Battle

  The battle of Stalingrad had wound down in the city itself during December 1942. Fierce fighting took place only out in the frozen wastes of the Volga–Don steppe where seven encircling Soviet armies were trying to crush the diseased and starving Sixth Army. But the Wehrmacht at bay was still a formidable force. In the city, there was a slight sense of anti-climax which came from a mixture of exhaustion, relief and sadness at the terrible losses. Grossman was profoundly moved when he discovered his nephew’s grave on 29 December.

  Grave of Yura Benash by Mikhailov’s command post – you have to go up just behind it. The commanding heights. There are four graves right above the cliff.

  He wrote about it to his wife as soon as he was back on the east bank.

  My dearest Lyusenka, I’ve just come back from the city, in order to write things up. I crossed the river walking over the ice. This recent excursion has caused me a lot of deep impressions. Imagine, my darling, there is the grave of Yura Benash, Vadya’s son, on the cliff above the Volga. I found his regimental commander, and he told me in detail about Yura. Yura was a battalion commander. He was fighting like a hero. His anti-tank company had hit sixteen enemy tanks. He led crazy attacks. Everyone talked of him with admiration. He knew that I was here, he kept trying to get in touch with me through people from the front editorial office, he wrote letters to me, but I never received a single one of them. Well, I’ve found him now.

  . . . Lyusenka, so much has passed before my eyes, so much that it’s hard to comprehend how my soul, my heart, my thoughts and my memory can still take all this in. I feel as if I am full to the brim with all this . . . Tomorrow I am going to sit down and write a very long essay.

  At the same time he wrote a similar letter to his father, recounting that Yura had received the Order of the Red Star and had been killed in an explosion a month before.

  There is no one to cry for him – neither mother nor a grandmother . . . I’ve wandered a lot over the last few days, I’ve seen a lot of interesting things, now I will sit down and write. I’d like to scribble something serious and big . . . I don’t know what to write about, there are so many thoughts and impressions, I wouldn’t know where to start. When I see you and we sit together, I’ll sit down in the red armchair and we will talk and talk.

  After the intensity and importance of the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman found it was hard to accept that life moved on in its usual way, that goodbyes could be hurried and casual after such momentous events.

  A commander leaves his regiment. Empty goodbyes: ‘Write,’ ‘All right, all right.’ Haste. And the man has been through all the hardships of fighting in Stalingrad.

  His own farewell to the place was made in his article for Krasnaya Zvezda entitled ‘Today in Stalingrad’.

  The winter sun is shining over mass graves, over handmade tombstones at the places where soldiers had been killed on the axis of the main attack. The dead are sleeping on the heights by the ruins of factory workshops, in gullies and balkas. They are sleeping now right where they had been fighting when alive. These tombstones stand by the trenches, bunkers, stone walls with embrasures, which never surrendered to the enemy, like a great monument to a simple, blood-washed loyalty.

  The Holy Land! How one wants to keep for ever in one’s memory this new city which gives its people a triumphant freedom, a city that has grown up among the ruins, to absorb it all – all the underground lodgings with chimneys smoking in the sun, nets of paths and new roads, heavy mortars raising their trunks among the bunkers and dugouts, hundreds of men wearing quilted jackets, greatcoats, ushanka hats, doing the sleepless labour of war, carrying mines under their arms like loaves of bread, peeling potatoes by the pointed trunk of a heavy gun, squabbling, singing in low voices, telling about a grenade fight during the night. They are so majestic and matter-of-fact in their heroism.

  Grossman was surprised by his own sense of pain when Ortenberg ordered him down to the Southern Front away from Stalingrad.

  We were leaving Stalingrad on New Year’s Eve. We are moved to the Southern Front. What sadness! Where did it come from, this feeling of parting, I never had it before during this war.

  Ortenberg had decided to replace
him with Konstantin Simonov, who would have the glory of covering the final victory. Simonov had visited Stalingrad with Ortenberg in the September days (when they had fallen asleep in Yeremenko and Khrushchev’s bunker on the west bank and awoken to find that the whole headquarters had disappeared in the night to transfer to the east bank). Grossman was the Krasnaya Zvezda correspondent who had spent by far the longest in the city and Ilya Ehrenburg was one of those who thought this decision unjust and illogical. ‘Why did General Ortenberg order Grossman to go to Elista and send Simonov to Stalingrad instead? Why was not Grossman allowed to see the ending? This I still cannot understand. Those months that he spent in Stalingrad and all that was associated with them remained in Grossman’s soul as the most important impressions.’

  Grossman wrote to his father just before leaving Stalingrad.

  Well, my [dear Father], I will say goodbye to Stalingrad tomorrow and travel towards Kotelnikovo [and then] Elista. I am leaving with a feeling of sadness, you know – as if I were leaving some person dear to me, as so many memories, so many thoughts and feelings, depressing and significant, exhausting, unforgettable are associated with this city. This city has become human for me. Father, things are going well at the front, and my spirits are now higher.

  The Southern Front extended through Kalmykia from the empty steppe south of Stalingrad, right into the northern Caucasus, from where Field Marshal von Manstein was withdrawing Army Group A in great haste. A second major Soviet offensive in the second half of December, Operation Little Saturn, threatened the Germans’ route of withdrawal around the Sea of Azov. This rapid retreat allowed Grossman to study what life had been like under German occupation, especially in Elista, the main town of the region some three hundred kilometres west of Astrakhan.