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

As I have said, I started out in 1946 with stories about Rzhev. Then I wrote about life in peacetime, roaming far from my own experiences into literary fiction. But what I had lived through would not let go. The last time I wrote about material quite detached from my life was when I submitted a story to Novy mir in 1961.

Since then what I have written has been not so much autobiographical as based on my own experiences. That was not what I first set out to do, but I found that my life was so full of impressions (as probably everybody’s is) that it squeezed out the adventitious, the borrowings, and that it was better to transfigure experience into prose unfettered by biography.

From a distance the war seemed to become more allusive, more visual. For many years I was pigeon-holed as writing what we call ‘war literature’. That is not entirely accurate because I do not write about pitched battles; I write about the world in wartime, about life in wartime.

In some ways it is harder and in others easier to write about the war. It is harder because much about war is monotonous, starting with people’s clothing. But it is easier because the plot is self-propelling. The war itself is the plot.

But you write wonderful prose about life before the war in Punctuation Marks; and about returning from the war. And you have promised to continue your novella, Hearth and Home. You looked even further back, into the history of your family and your ancestors in the cycle Byways of Memory . It is so enchanting, about how life is precious in itself, and there is no need for a plot.

Well, now I have been trying these last years to write about what affects me, what I have taken to heart, what stirs, enchants or torments me, to write without inhibition, without thinking about plot and character, and certainly not about whether something belongs to one genre or another. That is actually closest to autobiography, not necessarily in terms of facts although, if they do creep in, then in the context of everything associated with them that nourishes the soul, and memory, and emotion.

Perhaps, though, plot is a presumption, even a deception. Life itself in all its interrelatedness is the plot. Language is the self-propelling force behind prose.

I feel I should thank fate for my presence in all the unbelievable happenings of my many decades, and for being able to take advantage of the fortunate opportunity of wandering back through my life, looking more closely at some things, thinking them through, loving them more or repudiating them. Yet as I do that, I do not have the feeling of being transported back to the past, but of staying firmly in the here and now. The present is only an extension of our past, without which it would be completely surreal.

The main thrust of Yelena Rzhevskaya’s book as initially conceived was that Hitler’s corpse was found and identified by Soviet intelligence operatives in May 1945, but Stalin classified the information. In 1965, when Berlin, May 1945 was published in Russia, one state secret spawned another. All right, Hitler’s body had been discovered and identified, but there must be no mention of that having been turned into a state secret. Before Gorbachev’s perestroika it was impossible to publish the conversation with Marshal Zhukov. That story, and the frank discussion of Stalin’s personal decision to conceal the discovery of Hitler’s body from his own citizens and the Allies, and the analysis of the causes and consequences of that decision are among the main additions to the original text.

Vladimir Kozlov has revealed that in 1964 it was decided to create a special archive dedicated to the victory over Germany. It was in this nascent archive that Rzhevskaya worked. [1] Vladimir Kozlov, Gde Gitler? Povtornoe rassledovanie NKVD-MVD SSSR obstoiatel’stv ischeznoveniia Adol’fa Gitlera. Moscow: Modest Kolerov i Tri kvadrata, 2002. All archives were administered by the KGB, and its minders would allow no identification of the archival materials she had used in the book. [2] In 2007, preparing her book for translation, Rzhevskaya added references for the archive files. The archive she had worked in has been closed and part of it transferred to the State Archive of the Russian Federation. In 2014 I found these materials among the Molotov Papers, six substantial volumes which duplicate the Stalin Papers. The internal numbering of the folders is retained. Kozlov also describes Operation Myth in detail, which entailed trying (in vain) to force captured German witnesses to assert that the Führer was still alive and had disappeared. Rzhevskaya reconstructed the last days in the bunker and Hitler’s suicide using the testimony of Günsche, Linge, Baur and others, but did not know in 1965 that these records had been compiled as part of Operation Myth. When she did, she was again unable to disclose this mystery about a mystery. [1] Rzhevskaya heard about Operation Myth back in the 1960s. An editor at a publishing house whom she knew from her days at the Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History showed her the manuscript of a book by a Soviet participant in the operation. The book was not passed for publication. It is an aspect she specifically worked on for this edition.

Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter further differs from Berlin, May 1945 in including as many documents from Rzhevskaya’s personal archive as space would allow, and three chapters about the earlier years of the war in Russia and Poland. [2] Sadly, Major Boris Bystrov did not live see the book published. He returned to academic life after the war and died in 1963. Rzhevskaya’s archive contains illuminating letters from Faust Shkaravsky (1897–1975), and postcards and letters from Ivan Isaevich Klimenko (1914–98), as well as later interviews. Having worked in counterintelligence until 1970, Klimenko finally allowed himself to speak freely. My grandmother was insistent that ‘The storming and taking of Berlin cannot be properly understood outside the context of the war as a whole and of everything we experienced.’ As the years passed, she increasingly attached importance to the human dimension of the war. That is why this volume tells us not about battles, not only about the search for and identification of Hitler, but also about Matryona Nilovna, the indomitable mother in Zaimishche; about the sad story of a Belgian soldier and a Polish prostitute; and about Käthe Heusermann, a dentist’s assistant who identified Hitler and was rewarded with ten years in Soviet prisons.

Rzhevskaya featured Käthe Heusermann sympathetically in her memoirs from the outset, but knew nothing of Käthe’s transportation to Moscow until 1964, and learned of her subsequent fate only in 1996 thanks to Lev Bezymensky, when a copy of the typewritten pages of her memoirs found their way into Rzhevskaya’s archive. Excerpts from those memoirs are included here for the first time.

My grandmother wanted to do more for Käthe’s memory, and when Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter was already being translated into different languages, she asked me to search the Internet to find out more about Käthe’s later life and locate her relatives. That is how I obtained the memoirs of Theodor Bruck, the Jewish dentist, recorded by his granddaughter. These reveal the full extent of the efforts Käthe made to keep him safe.

In 2015, Zvezda, a Russian television channel, made a film about the discovery and identification of Hitler’s body and the role Yelena had played. For the first time the facts of Käthe Heusermann’s fate were made public on Russian television. Then, in summer 2016, Nina Belyaeva came to Moscow from Paris, intending to shoot a documentary about the finding of Hitler but, after hearing this story, decided instead to relate the fate of Käthe and the relationship between the two women, their meeting on the day the war ended, and their hopes for life in peacetime.