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

The person conducting my seminar at the Gorky Literary Institute approved of my writing and advised me to get it published. I worked up a cycle of stories, ‘At Rzhev’, and took it to a magazine. They gave it back to me: ‘Your stories are sad. They are about everyday details of war which are probably not really worth describing. People are tired of the war.’ And that was the end for me of writing about the war for a long time. I was not aware of how deeply this topic was embedded in me. I felt I had written as well as I could.

You returned to Moscow bearing the burden of feeling you had a duty to history and already knowing you had the vocation of a writer, but you were really very young by today’s standards – just twenty-five. You had yet to graduate from the Literary Institute, to find your own voice, and on top of all that to resolve some difficult issues of where to live and how to earn a living.

Lyuba, I won’t go into all the ups and downs of the twenty years that passed before the first publication of Berlin , when I managed to tell the whole truth about the death of Hitler and the discovery of his body, and to back up my eyewitness account with documents. That is for another book, which I intend to write. I want to write about it with all the details of life at that time in reminiscences that will be a continuation of Hearth and Home. It was a long, difficult journey.

Yes, I had a mission to make public the secret of the century, that we had found Hitler’s body. The way it turned out, none of the people caught up in those historic events was present at every stage of them except me, because you cannot get by without an interpreter. And none of the other participants had ever taken up the pen, or had any intention of doing so. People pinned their hopes on me to write about it because after I was demobilized I would be going to study at the Literary Institute. I myself had no intention of leaving these things hidden away, and my silence weighed heavily on me, but these facts had been classified a state secret and the price for disclosing them would have been seven to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Quite a long time. I had to watch history being distorted without saying anything, confiding only in close friends.

In 1948 the arrests started again. They affected people close to us. The sense of vulnerability was aggravated by my sense of having no rights and being unable to get a job on account of Point Five. Nothing – four years of active service in the army, medals – was considered in your favour. And worse was to come.

Do you remember, Lyuba, that visual aid, the skeleton with inventory number 4417 who migrated together with the Russian Red Cross’ evening course up and down Malaya Bronnaya, turning up one moment in the food hall of a grocer’s shop and the next on the stage of the Jewish Theatre? Next to us evening students, two elderly ladies were talking loudly to each other on the stage and clicking away on their abacuses. Backstage the sceneshifters were moving things around. The theatre was preparing for the start of the season.

At the start of the war, in summer 1941?

Yes. But some quite different memories are also associated with that stage for me: taking our farewell of Solomon Mikhoels. [1] The artistic director of the Jewish Theatre, and chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war. Tr. One dark, dank night in January 1948, I was waiting with my husband, Isaak Kramov, among a silent, dejected crowd who did not believe the story about a ‘road accident’. We were waiting for the coffin to be brought. It did not appear.

When I was very little, I lived on Tverskoy Boulevard in a building facing Malaya Bronnaya Street, and this nook of Moscow, with the colourful posters of the Jewish Theatre and the boulevard, bordered on my domain. That terrible evening it was tainted for me forever by something ominous and repulsive. In the towns and villages abandoned by the retreating Germans I remember the tragic face of Mikhoels in the role of King Lear, the duplicated photographs slapped on fences, stuck on wires, as the image of the Jew who must be exterminated. Now it had happened.

The following day the coffin was placed on the stage of the Jewish Theatre. We said goodbye to Mikhoels, along with a stream of people who walked past the coffin, crushed by our loss and this appalling sign of trouble brewing, from which there was no escape.

How could you live and write in a time like that?

You cannot live in constant fear: it just doesn’t happen. The contact between people, and love and friendship were more intense. We were close friends with some wonderful people. Despite all the hardships of daily life, we had such a creative atmosphere at home.

I was afraid of forgetting things about those events in Berlin, of letting them slip if I put everything off, so I began to write shortly after returning to Moscow, drawing on some entries in the notebook from that time. After Stalin’s death, in 1954, I took the manuscript to Znamya, which specializes in prose about the army. Because of the subject matter, the manuscript was sent for permission to publish to the Foreign Ministry. It was returned with their resolution: ‘At your discretion’: that is, they were not banning it. The editor, Vadim Kozhevnikov, was, however, highly circumspect in matters of discretion. He said to the editorial staff who were rooting for the manuscript, ‘This has never been written about before. Why should we be the first? And anyway, who is she?’ I was just someone off the street.

The manuscript was, nevertheless, published in Znamya (No. 2, 1955). It contained all the details of the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels, the discovery of Goebbels’ charred remains and those of his six children, murdered by their parents. They also kept in the testimony about the documents found in Hitler’s bunker and the main find: the diaries of Goebbels. There was the story of the removal and burning of Hitler’s body, and his burial there and then in the Reich Chancellery garden in a crater. In fact, everything except that we had found Hitler in that crater and identified him.

In other words, they left it hanging in the air whether this was fact or speculation. How did you manage to get round that ban?

That happened in 1961, in my book Spring in a Greatcoat, and in a fairly roundabout manner. After the war, I was drawn to impressions of life in peacetime. I wrote novellas that were far removed from my own biography, about life without the war, although interlayered with it.

The Soviet Writer publishing house was intending to publish a book consisting of two of my novellas, which I had already largely been paid for. It didn’t come off. Of course, I was very upset, but it was not the first or last time that a setback, providing it was not fatal, turned out to be all for the good. The publishing house had not forgotten the fee already paid and, two years later, suggested I should update the book. The writers Isaak Kramov and Boris Slutsky suggested I should slip in the Rzhev stories. So it was that in 1961 a book was published, titled Spring in a Greatcoat and containing stories about the war which had been lying around for fifteen years. They were warmly received, and that encouraged me to return to writing prose about the war. In addition, however, the book included my uncensored documentary account of how we found Hitler’s body. I put back in everything that had been taken out by Znamya: that is, everything about finding and identifying Hitler. Happily the censors paid no attention to the additions, because basically the text had already been published. And that is how, for the first time, the fact was made known that the Red Army had found Hitler’s body, although I had no documents to back that up, except for the one copy Ivan Klimenko had sent me.