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

My escort rushed over. ‘Comrade Regimental Commissar!’ He saluted, and reported my availability as if he had just captured me personally and was delivering me with perfect timing. ‘This way!’ That was addressed to me by the regimental commissar, who flashed his torch in my direction.

The snow stops, the wind now levelling out the crunching banks of snow. We come to an outhouse. The sentry steps aside. The light from the regimental commissar’s torch glides over the snow and suddenly, in the wide open doors of the outhouse, picks out alien, foreign, freezing soldiers huddled in a heap on rotten straw, clad in greatcoats, helmets and forage caps, and thin boots.

‘Ask who’s in charge.’ That I can manage. That I have learned. I say painstakingly, ‘Who is the senior person here?’ Stirring, swarming, consternation.

‘I am.’ A man comes to the open door, his greatcoat covered in wisps of straw.

‘Identify yourself! Rank? Name?’

‘Lance Corporal…’

He has been left in charge because the commanding officer, the senior lieutenant, has already been taken away. ‘He’s been taken for interrogation, to the chief of staff,’ the sentry reports.

‘This way!’ the regimental commissar strode off briskly to wherever we were to go. We followed, I and the German, stooped, his arms listlessly by his sides. We crunched across the snow, both of us cold, but he desperately cold.

A vehicle serving as an office, its bodywork covered with plywood. Felled spruce firs were leaned up against it for camouflage and in there, behind the plywood, like in a proper building, was a blazing hot stove. It was blissfully warm inside.

I pulled off a striped woollen scarf and put it in my greatcoat pocket. The German, stooping even more, sat down as indicated by the regimental commissar on the edge of a trestle bed. He was not young, forty or more, and had a haggard, greenish face. I would have been embarrassed to look at him too closely, and in any case had other things on my mind. I was trembling as if about to take an exam.

Did I have a pencil and paper? Only a German–Russian dictionary in my satchel, otherwise nothing. My rucksack had been left in a village on the far side of that field. Commissar Bachurin put a pencil on the table and tore a couple of sheets out of a notebook. ‘Let’s make a start! Ask him his name, age, where he comes from. And so on.’

I knew these questions in German by heart and, feeling a surge of confidence, turned to the German. The oil lamp on the table illuminated him clearly, and as I pronounced the question I saw his wrinkled, green-tinged face and his ears tucked under a cloth forage cap. It was the worn-out face of a working man whose best years are behind him. All that, however, was of secondary importance. If there was one virtue I was desperately hoping to find in the captive German facing me, it was clear diction and nothing remotely resembling a Bavarian accent. ‘Bitte, sprechen Sie langsam und deutlich,’ I said. Speak slowly and clearly.

‘Write!’ the regimental commissar instructed me. I elicited the prisoner’s first name and surname. He was born in 1896, so was seven years younger than my father. He pronounced numbers rather oddly, ‘ayn, tsvay, dray’, although I could guess what he meant.

The burden of anxiety that I would be unable to ask him questions or understand his answers gradually lifted. There remained, however, the burden of being in contact with him, with his ordinary little eyes and irredeemably foreign, disagreeable greatcoat. There sat Karl Steiger – I think that was his name – haggard, middle-aged, wearing his enemy greatcoat and representing something frightful and baffling: a prisoner. We were sitting close together, peacefully, but seeing each other through the inexorable distancing effect of our enmity.

‘Mällen,’ Steiger enunciated with some effort. I had never heard that word before. What could it mean? ‘Mällen,’ the prisoner repeated, showing black teeth when he smiled. ‘Raschen Mällen.’

During the First World War he and his family – who were living in Lithuania – had been interned deep in the Russian heartland, in Central Asia. ‘Mällen’ was evidently a word he was recalling from that time.

‘Melon,’ Commissar Bachurin responded unsmilingly. ‘Melon. Very good.’ ‘Jawohl! ’ the prisoner agreed. ‘Mällen ist gut, sehr gut! ’ ‘And war?’ the commissar asked pointedly.

‘ Mällen ,’ the prisoner persisted, evidently seeing his one word of Russian as a bridge between us. ‘Mällen ist gut.’ He lifted one foot, exhibiting a battered boot with a short, misshapen top. ‘War…’ Confidingly, smiling again, he said, ‘Please give me a blanket. In the shed it is so terribly cold. Brr!’ he added expressively, so that he should be understood by the regimental commissar without the need for translation. The commissar did not respond positively. ‘Ask him whether a Russian who gets captured also asks for a blanket?’

I translated and the conversation was over. Bachurin stood up. I and the German also stood up and waited for him to put his coat on. He went down the steps attached to the vehicle, folding the camouflage smock over his arm. I followed. The sentry saluted. The guard got out of the driver’s cab and stood next to the German.

‘Go to that hut,’ Bachurin instructed me. ‘Ask for Kondratiev, the cryptographer. He has German documents. Proceed to translate them immediately.’

In the hut the commissar had directed me to everyone was sound asleep on the floor. That struck me as odd. Wasn’t this the front line? Had I imagined that soldiers at the front stayed awake for nights on end? The truth was that, having only just arrived, I would not have minded lying down somewhere myself, but the commissar had ordered me to start translating a backlog of captured documents no one had even sorted through. The only person awake in the hut, the duty telephonist, opened a filing cabinet and took out the documents. In great agitation, I sat down by a lamp, anticipating that I was about to discover something of great importance. It was, however, only instructions on how to deal with lubricating oil at low temperatures, and I had translated something almost identical at GHQ. The other papers were of no greater significance. The cryptographer, Lieutenant Kondratiev, was a clever, ironical and independent-minded young man, something I appreciated only later. He gathered up all the papers and nodded at a chest. It was small, but something to sleep on nevertheless. Pulling off my felt boots, I thought about the Germans in that shed. ‘Please give me a blanket. In the shed it is so terribly cold.’ Oh God, how awful. ‘You’re not allowed to take your footwear off at night,’ the duty officer told the rookie scornfully.

I put my feet back in my boots. Fitting on top of the chest, no matter how I contorted my legs, proved even more difficult in felt boots. My legs hung over the edge, my greatcoat fell off, my hat and the bag with my dictionary, serving as a pillow, slipped from under my head.

In general, I never slept more soundly anywhere than at the front, no matter what the situation and in any position: on a bare trestle bed, on a bench, on the floor, propped up on my fists with my elbows resting on a table, standing, standing propped up by a wall. It did not matter how, just as long as I could sleep. That first night, however, it took me some time.

The phone rang and I heard the duty officer say briskly, ‘Stay alert. Yes, sir!’ Seeing I was not yet sleeping, when he had hung up he grinned at me and said, ‘Who was going to take her boots off? German tanks have broken through at Nozhkino-Kokoshkino. That’s 4 km from here.’ Having learned a few things about German tanks in Stavropol, I anxiously calculated that they could appear at any moment, but everyone carried on sleeping. Shortly afterwards, I fell asleep myself.