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

The newsreel scenes took us through the city of those times; something important was changing, brewing. The last straw was the deportation of the Jews. Again, a third, last close–up: an ordinary sort of man, unremarkable, burly, almost portly, with a short haircut. ‘I went to the station. A freight train was already there. They were brought, under guard. Armed German soldiers with assault rifles and dogs surrounded them. What could I do on my own, without a gun? But I saw it,’ he says angrily, with a shudder, clenching his fists. ‘I saw it.’

I think we mentioned him in our first conversation. What mattered very much to me was that he could have looked at that and not seen it. But he did see it, and what he felt was that, if he had seen it, he was complicit in it, and guilty of it and responsible for it. And at that he, eighteen years old at the time, became actively involved in the Resistance.

The film does not show, and there is probably no footage of it in the documentary film archive, a general strike by the Dutch dockers in protest at the deportation of their Jewish fellow citizens. The film does not show the statue of a docker, erected after the war in the square into which the Jews were herded. Neither does it show the monument to the leaders of this strike who were shot by the Germans. It electrified the country and the Dutch Resistance dates from that time. The director addressed not only the facts, but more the profound personal morality in individual people in those historical circumstances. When the lights came on, the very various members of the audience were red-eyed. Those people spoke so sincerely from the screen, as if at confession, as if talking to their own souls. What responsibility they feel for the time to which they belong, and for the mark they personally have left on it.

Personal responsibility for the time to which you belong. That is what you call involvement. And finally, after having been kept separate for so many years from your contemporaries, your fellows in the fight against Nazism, you saw them for the first time then, in London, on the screen in a television studio, and were deeply moved. This is another ‘meeting on the Elbe’, and profoundly touching.

After watching the film, as we left the television studio, we were each given a copy of the photo showing us on stage with our glasses of wine. Outside, in the studio’s showcase window, under a bright banner heading reading, ‘Our guests today…’ was the same photograph, greatly enlarged. So we ourselves entered the life of the city. It was not at all the London we had pictured from Dickens, shrouded in fog, prim, with gentlemen in top hats. This was a multi-cultural city with a picturesque mixture of races; it was both a financial centre and the home of hippies and miniskirts.

We were staying on bustling, commercial Oxford Street. Here, in the dense, diverse flow of people, modish, colourful gypsy skirts mingled with more formal attire, or suddenly you might see a long fur coat on a young man, or a man’s formal shirt revealing a bare young chest. There might appear a walking advertisement, like a round poster-covered pillar that had come to life, in which some hapless fellow had been squeezed headlong; or a hereditary professional beggar in a Scottish kilt, playing the bagpipes; or a posse of students suddenly pouring out of a bus and miming on a street corner a scene depicting the atrocities perpetrated by the Pinochet regime in Chile and appealing for protest.

Then a group of willowy Krishna devotees, in gauze robes completely unsuited to the season, with rings in their noses and partly shaven heads might fill the street with melodic chanting, moving along in line and leaping in the air to the accompaniment of a tin-whistle band.

Gazing wide-eyed at this colourful theatre of city life, I could not get out of my head that other, black-and-white, newsreel of a London on which German bombs were falling, which faced invasion by Hitler’s troops, and was covered in barricades, ready to fight and die on them.

The London Underground at night. For a full six years, just like in Moscow at the beginning of the war, little children were sleeping on the tracks. Anxious adults, the invariable accordion, and in the morning, on the pavement next to offices destroyed by air raids during the night, here and there a table and stools carried out, a secretary tapping away at her typewriter under a banner reading, ‘Still here. Still alive.’

Through a street strewn with the rubble of bombed buildings, the royal family pick their way to Madame Tussaud’s museum of waxworks, which has been damaged during the night’s bombing. Again the air raid sirens wailing, the three little pigs singing ‘We’re not afraid of the big, bad wolf!’ in a popular cartoon that was screened in the USSR, before the war came to us, too.

Churchill perched on a barricade, his great bulk looming above its top tier. His voice is heard: ‘If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say…’

On the screen we see Dunkirk. Defeat. British ships, besieged by fleeing soldiers, overloaded, listing, casting off. Soldiers too late to get on board swim desperately, furiously out from the coast after them. On the shore behind them there are only dead bodies, but the ships sail further and further out to sea.

An Englishman sitting by the television screen finishes the sentence before Churchill:

‘…this was their finest hour.’ It is a very famous speech.

‘…will still say,’ Churchill concludes resolutely, ‘this was their finest hour.’

The ships sail further away, to the coast of England, and there is no catching up with them. On the abandoned shore the wind rakes sand until the bodies of the fallen are motionless mounds. In the sea, soldiers drown.

Yes, that was Britain’s heroic, tragic, finest hour. I was filled with admiration as I saw for the first time the dignity and fortitude with which Britain, standing alone, confronted Nazi Germany, when almost the whole of continental Europe was under occupation or, in alliance with the Germans, had been dragged into the war, and imminent invasion by Germany was a real threat which receded only with Hitler’s attack on the USSR in June 1941.

I had a glimpse, if only through the lens of a film camera, of what lay beyond the lands our soldiers liberated. And I saw so clearly, and with such deep emotion, something I thought I already knew, and did, only in a more abstract way than I had realized: the Red Army saved the world. Our Patriotic War was the central event of the Second World War, and it rescued the Western countries with their self-sacrificing Resistance movements and this great island.

That means we rescued London and Big Ben, the British Museum, the graveyard for much-loved faithful pet dogs, Hyde Park with its Rotten Row trampled by horses’ hooves, the concert halls, the famous pubs, department stores and scattering of market stalls, Westminster Abbey and the slab under your feet enjoining you to ‘Remember Winston Churchill.’ (He is not buried under that stone but in the modest graveyard of his ancestral estate, as he himself willed.) Yes, we saved London, with all its problems, modern, bursting with life, with its own destiny and all its culture.

I took all that very much to heart and have never forgotten it. That too is part of the sense of involvement.

In Distant Thunder you can feel this sense of involvement, the joyfulness of the liberators, but in Berlin, May 1945, after the victory salvos, after the rejoicing, there is immediately a sense of the bitterness of victory. What was that? Where did it come from?

Bitterness is inseparable from victory. Victory brings to the surface our mourning for the dead, our sorrow at all we have been through. It engenders a tremendous sense of answerability for the future. And then, there is the need to return to civilian life, which seems already to have moved so far away from us. That bitterness brought enlightenment, but it could also bring despondency and crush people.