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

By this time my grandmother no longer had the strength to participate in filming and it fell to me to read on her behalf from her books and diaries. Nina Belyaeva managed to find Käthe’s eighty-year old niece. That is how her film ends: I in grandmother’s apartment in Moscow and Käthe’s niece in her own home read in turn from Käthe’s reminiscences of prison, her sentence, the journey to Siberia, the hard labour camp and her return. At one remove, Yelena and Käthe finally met in us and told the story to its end.

The film was shown on French television in spring 2017, and on 25 April Nina Belyaeva sent me a link to download it. [1] The film, The Death of Hitler: The History of a State Secret (in French), can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcDCtElYTT4 . I found it in my mailbox a few hours after my grandmother passed away.

Elena Kagan was born in Gomel, Belarus in October 1919. She moved with her family to Moscow in 1922 where she later studied philology at Moscow State University. After serving the war effort as a munitions worker and after finishing a war interpreter’s course Elena joined Gen Dmitry Lelyushenko’s army of resistance in 1942. By February 1945 Elena was working in Poznan before joining the USSR’s 3rd Army’s attack on the Reichstag in late April. Her journey to Berlin began in Rzhev on the Volga, where millions of Red Army soldiers died fighting German forces. She adopted the surname Rzhevskaya to honour the fallen.

Rzhevskaya was the first person to read key documents related to the last days of the Reich including the personal papers of Hitler. She lived in Moscow after the war to work as a writer and won prizes for her fiction and journalism. She was the author of two acclaimed history books and six war novels. She died in April 2017.

Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

This edition first published in 2018 by

Greenhill Books,

c/o Pen & Sword Books Ltd,

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S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS

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ISBN: 978-1-78438-281-0