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

So I continue to tell the story whose main character is the shambles of a war I too lived through, and now find myself the archivist of my own archive.

A. S. Andrievskaya:

When they descended on us they first ate, they feasted, so well groomed, playing their mouth organs, having a fine time: they had opened the gateway to Moscow!

But then next there was the commandant’s office, taking a census of the population. The firing squads appeared, the gallows. We went to the slaughter-house for bones and offal we would have fed to the pigs before that. We went out to the villages to barter it. The Germans confiscated things, sent them away back to their homes. They dug up the pits where townspeople had tried to hide at least some of their property.

In the summer and spring we ate goosefoot and nettles, dug out the tubers of frozen potatoes left over from the autumn of ’41. The number of people left in the city went down and down, dying of starvation and typhus they were. And then the real calamity began when they started taking people and sending them west. Trainloads of us. They took us under guard to Rzhev station, issued us one loaf of bread with sawdust per family, put us in goods wagons, locked them and took us off to who knows where. It was dark in the wagons, people, shouting and groaning, crying…

Faina Krochak:

The Germans are not all the same sort. There was some humanity. And one or two of our own troops, there’s no denying, were just brutes. Take Lena, my daughter, she was twelve then, had a fever; she was dying. I went to Chachkino to see the doctor. Fifteen kilograms of grain he wanted before he would even look at her. Anyway, in the city they had a clinic at the school. The German doctor came, and he said, ‘She needs to go to hospital at once.’

‘They took me on a sledge,’ Lena adds. ‘He came with us. A German orderly carried me. He came to see me after the operation and bandaged me up.’

The worst thing was the hunger. And also, out of all the other things, the sorting. On Commune Street, opposite the commandant’s office. Masses of people. The Germans forced everyone to go there, they shot people who did not go to the sorting. That was the most horrible of all the things that happened. People clinging to each other, wailing, crying. They tore a mother away from her sick child. They were deporting people.

The Germans, when they first came piling into the city, strutted around like they owned the place. One German came in to us with an interpreter and went to see Masha, who was in charge:

‘Tell me, will you, where the Jews are here.’

‘Never had any Jews here,’ Masha told them, quick as a flash.

‘Well, Communists then?’

‘They’ve all run away.’

On the school gate, people saw a teacher hanging. Hanged by the Germans. They said he was a Communist. Even before that they’d seized other Communists. Paraded them through the town and shot them by the Volga, on the far bank and on ours. For three days they wouldn’t let anyone take the bodies.

Every day the headman for our district came round. ‘Any Jews here, Communists?’

‘Why, do you think we’re breeding them?’

Two men were sawing in the street, Jews. ‘No more sawing for you,’ the headman told them. He betrayed them, and the same night they were taken away.

He came to see us again. ‘Faina, where were you yesterday?’

‘At home.’

‘I came round yesterday with the gendarmes and you weren’t in. I’ve registered you.’

‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’

‘Me, I’m the Russian people. Who are you then?’

He took me to the police station. The mayor of the city, what they call the Burgomeister, Kuzmin, says, ‘Why aren’t you wearing an armband?’

‘What armband, for heaven’s sake?’

‘It’s obvious from your accent what armband.’

I wasn’t afraid of their bullets. I was afraid they might bury me alive. But he let me go.

All the time they were driving residents from that side of the Volga to this one, to get everyone in one place. And after that they started deporting people.

Lena’s legs were all swollen. She had something growing on her face from the starvation.

Along comes the headman with the gendarme. The gendarme has this shiny badge on his chest, spurs clattering. ‘Well, young ladies are you ready?’ asks the headman.

‘We’ve no intention of being ready,’ Taisiya Strunina tells him. She was living with us at the time.

I started crying. ‘Are you a father?’ That’s what I said to the German. ‘I pulled back the blanket and showed her legs. ‘How can I go?’ He shook his head and left.

‘We’ll shoot her. You don’t have to worry.’ That was the headman. ‘And you will come with us.’

How many more days we had like that.

Lena:

The Germans came charging in. About ten in the morning on 1 March. Beside themselves, they were. Retreating. Surrendering the city. Scouring the place to find anyone who was hiding. The last ones. They herded us into the church. Our windows had the curtains closed. They smashed the glass with their rifle butts. They didn’t care if people were sick, or dead. They were crazy. I couldn’t stand. They put me on a sledge, tied me on with sackcloth.

Anna Grigorievna Kuzmina:

They packed the church full of people. It was cold. All the windows in the church were broken. I gave my husband one of my shawls. ‘A granny with a beard,’ the children in the church laughed. And then we heard, they were boarding the doors up from the outside.

Faina Krochak:

‘Give us water! Give us water! ‘A sentry threw a snowball in the window. Everybody wanted to suck it.

The gendarmes came twice, looking for some woman. They said, ‘Tomorrow it’s the end.’

Anna Grigorievna Kuzmina:

There were explosions, explosions everywhere. The people in the church groaned, screamed. Some people embraced. ‘It’s time to say goodbye! It’s time to say goodbye!’

It became very, very quiet. For three hours, it must have been. We look out the windows and see people in white smocks. With red stars.

This was resurrection. We hugged and kissed each other. Tears and weeping. A solemn moment. We had risen from the dead. It was a resurrection.

And then one old woman, whose name I don’t know, said, ‘Russians! Real Russians! They’re outside… their greatcoats are frozen hard as boards. Their boots are covered in ice. Everything on them is covered in ice. Can you believe it?’

The last people in Rzhev were supposed to suffer a cruel martyrdom in that church, for not abandoning their city. Their saviours appeared in white smocks, wearing a red star, in frozen greatcoats.

I received a letter, together with a bouquet of white roses, from Otto Spranger, a person in Munich I did not know. Here is how he explains what prompted him to write to me.

He saw a documentary film by Renata Stegmüller and Raimund Koplin about three women whose destinies were bound up with the war: a Norwegian woman; the famous Italian writer, Luce d’Eramo; and me.

As soon as the footage of Rzhev appeared on the screen, I was electrified. I realized that the Russian woman featured in the film had been a participant in the confrontation at Rzhev, had obviously chosen her pen name with reference to that city and, like a flash of lightning I remembered a close relative who, under particular circumstances, had also received a name in connection with Rzhev. With embarrassment I learnt that at that time Yelena Rzhevskaya was involved in the struggle against my uncle, Colonel Hans Beckmann, my mother’s elder brother: Beckmann von Rzhev, as he was called by his fellow officers.