Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

The face of war is unwomanly, I agree, but neither is it manly. The face of war is just the face of war. Can one really find any point of comparison between war and ordinary human life? The way people behave in the circumstances of war are out of the ordinary, unimaginable, as a result of the dictates and the demands it makes on a person’s physical and mental endurance. In fact, at the front people tended never to fall ill, and even chronic ailments often retreated and ceased to be troublesome. In my own experience, I caught a slight cold during the winter in Stavropol-on-Volga while I was wearing a summer forage cap, canvas boots that were no good for keeping your feet warm, and staying in an unheated room; but for just over three years after that, when I was continuously at the front, I was never ill at all, although the circumstances and conditions I was working in would have seemed guaranteed to make you ill. But that was only by peacetime standards.

Of course, life at the front is particularly difficult for a woman with her natural differences from men, and there is no need to go into further detail about that. Women can also be subjected to sexual harassment, although most of the time relations were on a comradely level. The Germans had no women right at the front: no typists, no nurses, no female cooks or laundressess. Not one. Only at a very remote airfield might you happen to find a female German telephonist.

The army at Rzhev in which I began my service was commanded by General Lelyushenko. ‘The Soldier General’, he was called out of earshot, always at the front line, with one foot in a jeep and the other on the ground. He could not abide women in the army, and for some reason called them ‘flatheads’ and bawled out a divisional commander he heard was keeping a woman. ‘Catching flatheads, are we?’ Everybody quailed before that reproach. At that very trying period in the war, moral standards in Lelyushenko’s army were markedly strict. But that only meant that emotions, which in any case no one was expected to show, were even more furtive. In war, when any hour might prove your last, feelings were intense and not even an army commander could abolish them.

After the war, when our army had reunions, Colonel Kozyryonok, the military prosecutor, told me there had not been a single military crime committed in our army by a young woman. They were significantly more reliable than men. The Germans might be on the outskirts of a village, but the telephone operator would not leave her post until given the order. The prosecutor was less complimentary about men. ‘If men could have got away from the front by becoming pregnant,’ he said laughingly, ‘we would have had an epidemic of desertion on those grounds.’ One girl was, in fact, court martialled for desertion after she ran away to another unit to which her boyfriend had been transferred.

Her time to love coincided with the war, and no doubt she was judged without pity, bearing the full brunt of martial law. All that sort of thing was hair-raising.

In war a man can dedicate himself wholeheartedly to warfare, but a woman continues to live to a much greater degree with her emotions. I think a woman living at the front is always in conflict with war (even if she doesn’t know it) and that it violates her emotions.

Is there such a thing as a woman’s view of war? What does it reveal?

I wouldn’t presume to say whether there is a women’s view that reveals something new, because that is what I write about. Someone less involved could probably be more objective. It might be simpler to talk about the general attitude of women towards war. Nowadays they are unanimously against it. Women do not accept war in any guise: it brings death and violence and they oppose it. As far as the Second World War is concerned, there is no evidence of a specifically women’s view of it in the literature.

We might well ask women who were young girls then, rushing headlong to the front without a clue as to what might be awaiting them, why, having found out and faced mortal danger, why when they were wounded and lying in hospital, they could not wait to get back to the front line, despite having every opportunity to stay in relative safety. Why today is it far more difficult to find a woman who will decry her years at the front and say her youth was ruined, than to find one who will say those were the best years of her life? Why? If we take their answers we will be get a sense of women’s views about what we rightly call the Patriotic War.

Did anything at the front remind you of the fact that you were Jewish?

On the very first night I arrived there, I found that our army was trapped in a pocket. From periodical reports we gathered the neck was widening at one moment, but contracting the next and might at any moment be closed completely. At the time I reached the front our neighbouring 39th Army was totally surrounded. Facing the risk of being taken prisoner, you could hardly forget the answer to Point Five. I did not yet have any comrades I could turn to; I was an unknown quantity to those I needed to escape with. Everything was rather wobbly. When I was eventually issued my own TT pistol I felt a whole lot more secure.

You were not taught to shoot on the course for translators…

That’s right. General Biyazi who was in charge of the course assured us we would be taught to shoot at the front, but that did not happen. I was given a loaded pistol and shown what to press. I had no expectation of going into battle, but at least I would be able to deal with myself.

What about the people you came into contact with. Did it matter that you were Jewish?

That did not affect me at all. What got you accepted was something different. They needed an interpreter, and now it turned out the interpreter was a woman. I was the only woman among a lot of men and it was awkward for them, too. They couldn’t swear in front of a woman, which meant they could hardly speak. I was deployed in an army that had retreated all the way from the USSR border. These people had been through a lot together, and then along comes some Muscovite, some student. They needed to be very tolerant. I was not one of them.

I had a Bible in my backpack, which I had seen for the first time in my life in the possession of my friend. Her mother worked in the Party publishing house and among her anti-religious armaments was a Bible published, for some reason, by the Seventh-Day Adventists. At the end of the course we went to General Staff Headquarters in Moscow to be assigned and I spent a couple of nights with Vika Malt. Noticing I was interested, Vika gave me the book with the thoroughly atheistic inscription, ‘Good luck, Lena. Vikukha.’ At the front I sat down one day to read the Bible still, of course, a bit disorientated. We had a major from the Border Guards assigned to us for a time. He had a pleasing, open expression. Someone pointed me out to him. ‘She reads the Bible.’ ‘And why not?’ he said. ‘A very fine work of literature.’ That took the heat out of the incident.

At the front I made notes, not systematically though, in fits and starts. That was looked askance at, too, at first, because keeping a diary or making notes was not allowed. I was well aware people would get curious and peep into it, so I wrote in the notebook, ‘Comrade Captain Borisov, are you not ashamed to be reading someone else’s diary?’ One day when I opened it, I found scrawled in large letters, ‘Should I be?’ I still have that notebook, complete with its obtrusive comment. After that I was left in peace, accepted, and in any case they appreciated my interpreting. I found I could do the job well. As time passed the attitude towards me became friendly.

You said once that, working as an interpreter, you found being a woman had its advantages.