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

I think in some ways it had. One prisoner told me that meeting a woman in such circumstances seemed like a good omen, a sign of mercy. The prisoners asked for help: one told me his wife had ‘a child on its way’ and asked me to let her know through the Red Cross that he was alive and in captivity; he did not know we were unconnected with the Red Cross. If I was on my own with a prisoner, which was usually the case, it was less like an interrogation than a conversation. And I had successes. Sometimes it was remembered I ought to have security and a soldier was assigned. On one occasion an officer who had come down to the dugout heard the guard snoring and grabbed a sheath knife lying on the table in front of me.

‘What’s this knife doing there?’ he asked.

‘It’s for sharpening my pencil.’

Did you find it difficult to play the role of interrogator?

I was helped in a way by a pilot who had been shot down and who had been strafing women. I asked him why he had been firing at them when he could see they were just women working in the fields. The plane had been flying very low, directly above them.

And he replied, ‘Ich habe meinen Spass daran.’

He did it just for fun. That made me shudder. It was the first time I had encountered a real Nazi, an enemy.

I felt sorry for the first prisoners. That was upsetting. The middle-aged German, the same age as my father, who was trying to remember the Russian word for melon and was feeling cold in the shed and asked for a blanket. Or handsome Thiel, with his university education. They were bewildered and feeling wretched. It is probably impossible to convey the feeling, to reproduce it artificially. What comes closest is perhaps the notes I jotted down in my notebook. I included them later in my book, Near Approaches .

On the course for military translators, skipping the firing practice and anything military, we did in an odd, unconventional way, as if from the wrong end, get drawn into the war, immediately coming into contact with the enemy, his German language, his pass and record book – the Soldbuch – his regulations and commands, his personal letters (how those Germans tormented us with their letters!), his intricate Gothic script, his military terms we found it so difficult to learn. And to enable us to master the language as such, children’s reading books and stilted dialogues: ‘Wo warst du, Otto? ’ ‘Where have you been, Otto?’ ‘Oh Karl, I had a lovely boat trip on the lake.’ And Heine: ‘Mein Liebchen, was willst du mehr? ’ And our role-play interrogations, when we took it in turns to be the German prisoner and then the Soviet commander interrogating him.

And then, when we were about to go off to the front, charged up, if very hastily, with the German language, I felt my heart contract with fear that, when I met an actual prisoner, I might suddenly have to witness him being subjected to cruelty and violence.

On my first morning at the front, in a lull between two frenzied bombings, I came out of a peasant hut to see a sleigh being drawn along the street bearing a wounded prisoner. I followed it, fascinated, and it soon stopped. I caught up when the driver had just got off and was thinking something over. I drew myself up and asked loudly, ‘Are you taking him to be shot?’ assuming that must be the case. The elderly, moustachioed driver scowled at me over his shoulder and said rattily, ‘We don’t shoot prisoners,’ and went off behind the hut to relieve himself.

Then I excitedly asked the German lying in the sledge where he came from, and heard his listless response, ‘Oh, whatever next!’ The wounded man was not in the mood for polite conversation. I walked back, grateful to the old driver for the lesson he had taught me with his contemptuous scowl. At the time, I wrote down in my notebook, ‘This war will be won by those who show magnanimity,’ hoping that we would be those winners.

However, our strong and, for the time being successful, adversary had long ago rejected the concept of greatness of heart. What mattered was only strength and brutality. The world was increasingly divided into the conquerors and the conquered, with no gradations in between. What place did that leave for greatness of heart? Increasingly what was being inculcated, and accepted, was that against victorious strength and brutality we should pitch our own strength, hardware, and brutality.

The army in which you found yourself had retreated all the way from the frontier and become charged with hatred of the enemy, but you too saw a lot of dreadful, inhuman sights, and your experiences were soon the equal of theirs.

The Rzhev concentration camp was monstrous. The living and the dead were lying side by side on the ground. The Germans derided their prisoners: they would bring frozen potatoes and scatter them on the ground; the halfdead prisoners would crawl to get them, and the guards would lash them with whips. In the middle of the camp a gallows operated tirelessly.

Advancing westward, we walked over trenches full of bodies. Trenches. In addition to the large, well-known concentration camps, there were so many local camps. In the camps the bodies were dumped in pits and had a light covering of soil thrown over them, and when our armies were advancing, the Germans started digging them up and burning the bodies to cover their tracks. They rarely had time to finish the job.

Burned villages. There were dedicated arsonists, ‘torchers’ in the German units. Hitler’s order for scorched earth when they retreated, that was Nazism in action. Destruction of the land, destruction of the people. When we entered a village there was no longer a village, just embers and ashes. Out of a ravine, or some dugout they had put together, an old, exhausted man would emerge, women, a child barely alive. Yes, that made you feel hatred.

But I can say, looking back now after so many years, my humane feelings were not eradicated. It was hard, but something I had brought from my childhood, that had grown stronger when I was a young student, my – and I am not going to shrink from using the word – my internationalism, stayed with me. In the institute where I studied there was not and could not have been any discrimination along racial or national lines, and after many years, when we reminisced about one of our fellow students, we often could not remember what his or her nationality had been. There was then, there really was, an amazing sense of national fraternity and unity, and it is unforgivable that it has been perverted and destroyed. It will be a long time yet before we recover from the consequences of that.

Your youth was identified with the amazing, unique Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History that existed for seven years and was closed down at the outbreak of war and merged with Moscow State University. You have written wonderfully evocative words about it, which echo in the heart of anyone who has been touched by the sense of community in colleges and special schools or even dreamed of it.

I was looking to explain to myself what it was about the institute that remains so indelibly alive in all of us who studied there: a generation cut across and crippled by the war, that endured such terrible losses and upheavals.

What was it about IPLH? Just pronouncing those initials aloud is a signal, they radiate something. Unacquainted people, when they discover they both came from IPLH, immediately feel they have something in common. Is it because that is where we spent our youth? Of course, but that is not the whole story. Or perhaps the IPLH legend is just an illusion, albeit a longlasting one. But if it is, then it is one of those about which a clever English writer said that an illusion is one of the most important facts of life.