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

In the morning the village was bombed mercilessly. The Germans had worked out that our army headquarters was located here, although the command post had already moved to the forest. With only brief pauses, they were circling above the village all day.

The ghastly shrieking of planes circling lower and lower, their shadows speeding over the snow: the unendurable whistling of a released bomb eats into your spine. Then the roar as it explodes. Above us, whether we are dead or alive, a snowy tornado whirls. Suddenly, very close, there comes the harsh rattling of a machine gun. More fountains. We, dark, motionless marks on the snow, wait, quaking. How easy it would be, right here, right now, to cease to be. Then, at last, he is leaving, wagging his tail with its black German cross.

And we are still alive! We rush onwards, somersaulting in the snow, throwing back our heads to gaze up into the sky and its unbounded openness. Sky and snow, and ahead of us the black edge of the forest beyond the snow-covered field. Safety! Just get there, hide out until dark. But before we can reach the forest God knows how much more snow we have to wade through, perhaps almost a kilometre. In the air, from afar, still weak, but… a droning. The droning of an aircraft!

Those who are strong and further ahead, closer to the forest, may get there in time but we will not. We are not going to make it. We turn off on to a hardened, icy strip of snow towards a shed we see not too far away. When we reach it, the commander of the anti-aircraft gunners, a roundfaced, placid, neat man appears on its icy threshold. He tells us the political instructor has been killed; he had just finished handing out parcels to the soldiers.

‘His stomach was turned inside out. We are sad!’ he said and went back to his post at the gun.

Until the end of that day we were shifting around, trying to dodge the bombing. The places we found! Vegetable plots in someone’s snow-covered trenches, potato clamps, a dugout occupied by a family whose hut had burned down. It was the kind of day that might have been described in official German reports in language along the lines of, ‘Engaged in fighting of local significance. Air power used for targeted bombing to harass enemy forces.’

My own forces were well and truly harassed by the time it started snowing, darkness fell, and it was finally possible to get back home.

The prisoners were being led through the village towards us. They were not marching but straggling, bent over against the cold. I stopped to see whether yesterday’s Karl Steiger was among them, a man who knew the Russian for ‘melon’ and wanted a blanket. In the darkness all the Germans looked alike. I managed only to count them. There were seventeen, so he must have been. They were being taken off somewhere. Well, good luck to them. No business of mine.

When it was dark, all those with whom I had shared my first day at the front being bombed were taken out of the village and into the forest where they would be safer. I was not.

Holding a sooty cooking pot at a distance in order not to mark my greatcoat, and clutching the German papers I had been given, I entered the hut to which I had been ordered to report. The first thing I saw was my rucksack, tied with the twisted blue cord from my mother’s curtain, which had evidently been delivered from the village where our truck got stuck yesterday as we were on our way here with our escort. I introduced myself.

‘Excellent!’ said a hefty, red-haired man, a captain by the name of Kasko, who was sitting on a wooden bench by a desk and, with the aid of a thick book which served as a ruler, drawing a table on a sheet of paper. ‘Where did you disappear to for twenty-four hours?’ ‘I was translating this,’ I said, waving my pathetic bundle of papers.

‘We’re really suffering from a shortage of translators.’ That was rather pleasing to hear. Evidently great things had just been waiting for me to come and accomplish them. ‘Get your ID ready for me to inspect.’

For some reason this is always the way: you are getting along fine, feeling relaxed, when someone suddenly demands, ‘ID!’ and you practically choke. Cooking pot down on the floor, hasty delving into the field case at my side, and all it is about is your travel orders, your food ration entitlement, and your graduation certificate from the army translation course.

‘What a shower! They didn’t even ask to see your food ration entitlement? They fed you anyway?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘They feed just anyone. Have they no shame?’ He pushed my documents to the end of the table and invited me to take off my greatcoat and sit down. ‘We’ll get round to you in a moment.’ It was at least warm in here and I was perfectly happy to wait.

Kasko carried on busily plotting his table. The edge of the book he was using as a ruler was uneven, and he would sit down, then get up, move the oil lamp around on the table examining his work and, when he found a less than straight line, erase it and return to his drawing.

It was already night but he was evidently still not ready for the couriers. They arrived nevertheless, and came in one by one, dusted with snow, frozen stiff, from various sectors of the front. They sat down at the table, lit up a cigarette avidly, talked excitedly about how the fighting had gone, who had prevailed over whom and, out of the chaos of battle, the incoherence of war, emerged the names of those who had died. Some had gone over the top, crawling out into the snow to suppress a firing point and never returning; some had been covering the withdrawal of a raiding patrol; or been cut down by enemy fire, a hail of bullets, raking fire, crossfire…

Captain Kasko heard the couriers out amiably enough, then stood up from behind the table. He was a big man, his ginger hair cropped short up the back of his head. He stretched, shifted from one foot to the other in his felt boots, and in a far from nocturnal, indeed brusque morning tone, slapped one hand upwards against the other and barked, ‘Details of location (slap), time (another slap). Proof of death?’

The person reporting was not, however, a professional messenger of death and could not fit the tale he had to tell to the three points demanded. He had made his way through the icy cold, the snow, the darkness to bring to this place his last farewell to the dead and to register their heroism for posterity. He became even more heated. There was only one person listening to him: me, and even I was less than reliable. I was dog tired, halfasleep, and had swimming around in my head, ‘ID!’ ‘Proof of death!’ and suddenly, ‘We are sad!’

‘Bed down here to sleep tonight,’ the captain said, indicating the wooden bench he was sitting on. So my first day at the front was not yet over. Was this how I had imagined it back there on the army translation course? ‘Air attack!’ ‘Don’t give your position away!’ ‘Get down!’ There had been only the rap of these commands, and fear, and nothing heroic. Perhaps there was something different, right up at the front where the couriers were coming from, not just the freezing cold and death. Perhaps there death could not be fitted into such dull headings as ‘at his post’, ‘while on a military mission’. The messengers, however, went back, and the dead were left in the hands of Captain Kasko. If only this ginger-mopped Charon would get his butt off that bench and move to the stool, but it did not occur to him to let me sleep in the place he had indicated; he was too busy casting spells over his chart, preparing his report, his summary for this day of war.

‘Right then,’ said Captain Kasko. ‘Now for some information about you.’ He took a blank sheet of paper and dipped his pen in the spill-proof inkwell. ‘So, born in Byelorussia, nationality Jewish, resident of Moscow, student.’ He then informed me, ‘In the morning you are being sent to Captain Borisov in an intelligence section group.’